The Hanging Tree
by David N. Brown
Summary: Gale Hawthorne is on a quest to find more survivors of District Twelve. But all is not what it seems...
1. The Lake House

**I'm a long-time contributor to this site, and recently read "Hunger Games". This is an idea I came up with, based on an idea for an interesting character combination and a Ray Bradbury story. To start things off, I decided to postpone the exposition I had planned and open with a good "in media res"...**

Gale Hawthorne awoke with a woman in his arms. His first impulse was to check who it was. He looked to find his companion already looking at him with wide, somewhat slanted eyes. For a moment, he had a vision of a half-seen, scaly visage half-seen in darkness, just before it struck. Then the face resolved itself into a very familiar one, gazing patiently yet expectantly at him in the early morning light. "Katniss," he said.

"You sound surprised," she said.

Memories of the previous night rose in Gale's mind, blurred impressions of ecstatic frivolities that ended at the door of a concrete cabin, and other scenes of previous days and nights, sharp yet oddly disjointed, like cue cards seen from a stage. "I guess I need time to get used to this," he said.

"Time to get used to being married to me?" Katniss asked.

"Well, it's only been one night," he said. "I can't say it's the first thing I would have expected, either. Especially not with you." As he spoke, he recalled something he had overheard his father say once. It had gone to the effect that if one awoke in bed with a woman without a clear idea how one got there, it was best to get out as quickly as possible. It was one of the nicer things he could recall his father saying about women.

He started to sit up, but supple arms drew tighter around him. "But you wanted this," Katniss said, pressing closer. She was clothed in a nightshirt, which Gale knew was more than she would be wearing if anything had happened. But if the night of the Toasting had been anticlimactic, she was clearly more than willing to give him another pass.

He gently but firmly extricated himself. "I have, for as long as I've wanted anyone," he said. "But I can wait. I need to go search the woods, to see if there are more people like us. If we made it, others could have too. You should come with me. You love the woods."

"No," Katniss said. "I loved being in the woods with you. You and my father. Now that we're here, I don't care as much about the woods."

"Then come and be with me, and we'll relive old times," Gale said. He threw open the curtains. The cabin window looked across a lake, surrounded by mountains and forest. Around the edges of the lake were other cabins. They were well-spaced, and built with an eye to camouflage, but they were all over, and where he spotted one, as often as not he saw another. It was a sizable village worth of cabins, and the cue cards in his mind showed him its construction.

First, it was him and Katniss, hiding out from the Capitol in a one-room cabin used by her father, fleeing a convoluted scheme to force Katniss to marry another young man. Then their families followed, and friends, even Katniss's official fiancee Peeta, and they had met up with people who had been living in the forest all along. At first, they made do with hiding in caves and crude tents, avoiding any semblance of new construction that might attract the attention of the Capitol hovercraft that could be seen cruising overhead. But then there was the great exodus, waves of scores and hundreds of refugees from District 12 with ever more dire tales of Capitol crackdowns and attrocities, and finally of a conflagration that wiped out District 12 and rumors of a general rebellion. By then, Capitol craft were nowhere to be seen, and people were freely building their own houses, at first only crude lean-tos, and then simple cabins, and soon enough good-sized houses. But he insisted on staying in the first simple cabin, and when Katniss agreed to marry him, they took the Toast and she moved in that very night.

Cue cards in Gale's mind put names and faces to cabins. The nearest belonged to his family, and Katniss's. A lakeside cabin in the near distance belonged to Haymitch, champion of the Capitol's cruel Games. Another, almost directly across the lake, held an old man named Jan Donner, who lived with his granddaughter Jo. Donner had been one of a number who had been living in the woods even before the migration. Next door were three others, a woman named Twill and her husband and daughter.

Gale's gaze flicked back to the Donner cabin, to glimpse a moving figure that was utterly innocuous, except that the furtive manner of movement suggested someone who did not wish to be seen. Then he noticed something else that seemed off. The figure- he was fairly sure it was a woman- had hair dyed an unnatural red and styled in spikes, like something out of a bygone Capitol broadcast. "I should go outside for a while," he said to Katniss.

"But you cannot go out today," Katniss said. "We have to be here when our families and friends come to congratulate us. My own family said they would be coming over for breakfast."

"Yes. Your mother. And Prim," Gale said. He wondered why he felt a chill rising in him.

"And my father," Katniss said.

"Yes. Of course. Your father," Gale said. Outside the window, the woman was drawing closer. From around a tree, she waved, as if trying to get his attention. She glanced over her shoulder, and then ran. "I think I shall wait for them on the porch."

The front porch was almost as big as the cabin interior, and set up with benches and a decent-sized dining table. He was greeted by a woman he knew well, and regarded with a kind of condescending endearment: Old Silly Dilly Cartwright, who a placecard told him was now wife of Peeta Mellark. He had a satisfying vision of his old rival living with Dilly in a luxurious house on the far side of the lake, just out of sight. Dilly chattered randomly as she dropped off a basket ot rolls. He remembered something else his father said, about how a woman talking was like a squeaky wheel, and Dilly was one person who lived down to it. Gale nodded and smiled along until she wandered off, marveling at her banality and wondering what even Peeta could have done to deserve being married to her. "Hey," a voice hissed, "Other Lover Boy."

He looked down to see the woman from Donner's house, crouched in the bushes. "Do I know you?" he said, puzzling over the question himself.

"Yes, you know me," the woman said. She spoke through gritted teeth, and he got the feeling that she was compensating for a feeling of doubt or uncertainty about what she said. "My name... is Johanna... _Mason_... I come... from District Seven. I came here... with you... and we are not... where you think... You must... come with me... _**now.**_"

Just then, Katniss appeared at Gale's elbow, or else she had gotten there so silently that he did not notice. "I am sorry, but my husband can't come out now," she said. "But we can give you tea."

Johanna nodded and mounted the steps, smiling. "Do I know you?" Katniss asked.

The guest looked at her and smiled wider. "No," she said, "_you_ don't." With that, still smiling, she thrust a knife into Katniss's heart.


	2. Prodigal's Welcome

_Three days earlier..._

Neither Gale nor Peeta pretended to be happy as they met on the train platform. Peeta was the nearly official leader of what remained of District 12. Gale had been a successful reporter in District 2, working in that capacity to investigate the fates of District 12 residents who had been transferred before its "liquidation" by the Capitol. He stepped off the train, and three others followed: Johanna Mason, Hunger Games champion of District 7, Victoria Gimble, one of the "mole people" of District 13, and a man of perhaps fifty, dressed in sackcloth with a big placard fastened to his clothes that read: I AM ROMULUS THREAD HEAD PEACEKEEPER OF DISTRICT 12. I PLANNED THE GENOCIDE OF 9,000 CITIZENS OF PANEM.

Curious onlookers approached the platform. Some wore ordinary clothes, some mining uniforms of bygone days, and a fair number wore the gray uniforms of Restorers, former peace keepers conscripted as laborers in wartime reparations. Most of them clearly recognized Thread, and even his former comrades were clearly anything but friendly. "Bet you wish President Paylor hadn't abolished the death penalty," Peeta muttered to Thread.

"I wish they would get this placard right," Thread answered, neither loud nor quietly. "Remember, that's why I'm helping you."

"How about you sing for your supper, Confessor?" Johanna said.

When the new government had proposed replacing the death penalty with life-long servitude, just as the Capitol had done with citizens convicted of treason, they had proposed a provision said to be worse than execution: Rather than being rendered mute like the Avoxes, the Confessors would be required to recite on demand the crimes for which they were convicted. Thread surveyed the crowd, and waved his hands almost in an exagerated shrug. "Let's call a spade a spade, shall we?" he said. "I am Romulus Thread. I submitted a feasibility study."

Three big men stepped forward, all wearing miner's helmets. The leader had burns over half his face. Then someone cut in front of them all, grinning broadly. "Hey Vickee how you doing?" Haymitch Abernathy said. He went right up to the mole woman, threw his arms around her, and kissed her on the lips. "Johanna, long time no see! And Gale, you could use a phone once in a while!" He threw an arm around Gale, and then looked to the peacekeeper. "And you, how about we get you into something more comfortable."

The crowd parted, and the group of five marched away in the direction of Victory Village. Gale walked alongside Peeta, both of them trying to look amicable. But it clearly had little effect on the villagers who gathered to watch. Every face could have told the tale, if not of what had transpired then of the impressions they had made on their fellow men. Gale was the hero who had saved the District, only to leave his people behind. Peeta was the awkward black sheep who in many eyes had betrayed his people, but had risen tentatively to leadership. Before that, they had been rivals in a tragic love triangle for the heart of Katniss Eberdeen.

It was Gale who finally spoke: "How's Katniss?"

"Married," Peeta said curtly. After a tense moment, he added, "We had the wedding a couple months ago. Everybody came. I mean, literally, everybody in Twelve showed up. Katniss wanted to invite you. I said you wouldn't come."

"How sweet. Are you still sleeping together?" Johanna said. "You were so cute together in the last Games. Like racoons with a can of pineapple they can't open." Peeta's face flushed. Gale would have smirked, but Johanna had already had the entire train ride to get back under his skin.

"What's she doing here?" Peeta said.

Gale shrugged. "We work together, on and off. She asked for the assignment. I think they accepted her because Katniss said no. Who knows, maybe she threatened to eat somebody again."

Peeta looked back at Johanna, then at Gale. "You didn't... Oh yeah, you did."

"It wasn't like that," Gale said.

"Well, promise you won't tell me what it was like," Peeta said, "and I won't talk any more about Katniss."

Dinner was at Peeta's house, which had been repurposed as an administrative building. Dilly Cartwright was on hand to cook, and Romulus served and poured without being asked. Johanna did most of the talking. "So, what's new in Twelve?" she said.

"We found another twelve bodies last week," Peeta said. "They tried taking shelter in a blacksmith's forge. Smoke inhalation got them. We might be able to identify them."

"That makes, what, 5,000?" Johanna said. "Then there's 839 who made it to 13... 100 guestworkers in 2, 50 of whom Gale found alive... 100 the Capitol interned... those people in the woods, was it two dozen?... I guess that leaves 4,000 to go, dead or alive. Of course, that's what we're here for."

"We are here for far more than that," Romulus said. "If there are more survivors of 12, they are not necessarily safe. If they are not safe, and perhaps even if they are, then all Panem may be in danger."

"Whatever," said Johanna. "So, Peeta, people are still asking... Are you and Katniss going to try for another baby?"

He sighed. "She wants to wait," he said, meeting a pointed gaze from Gale. He looked to Haymitch, who had been chatting intermittently with the mole woman. "How about you fill me in on what's going on with these two? I think Katniss knows, but she won't tell me."

"I'll tell you when you get your own business straightened out," Haymitch answered.

"I'm the District 13 liaison to 12," Victoria said coolly. "I was assigned to work with Haymitch to compile data on the pre-Rebellion district. He has been helpful."

Haymitch looked back more knowingly. "Come on," he said, "I'm old enough to be her dad."

"Haymitch," Victoria said, with a hint of redness creeping in around the ears, "I'm twenty-eight..."

"Trust me," Haymitch said, "in Twelve, I'm old enough."

As Romulus and Dilly cleared the plates, Peeta excused himself. "Say hello to Katniss for me," Johanna told him. "I'm sorry she couldn't come over. I hope we can see her before we go."

"I'm sure Katniss will make time to see you," Peeta said, looking at Gale. "Good bye."

"Good luck," Johanna called after him. "You know... with trying." He left, flushing again.

"Peeta instructed that the master bedroom be prepared for Gale," Dilly said. "There are guest bedrooms upstairs. He asked me to leave for the night, in case you want privacy." With that, she walked out the door. Romulus was already lumbering upstairs. Haymitch and Victoria followed, talking quietly. A door shut, and another. Gale and Johanna listened for a moment, and heard a third door shut.

Gale and Johanna looked to the door of the master bedroom. "I should go upstairs," Gale said. "It's the chivalrous thing."

"Thanks," said Johanna. "Just as well. Sometimes, I grind my teeth in my sleep, and who knows where that might lead." She went in the bedroom and almost shut the door.

"Who knows," Gale muttered, and went upstairs.


	3. The Better Can Opener

It was late morning, and Thread stood in Peeta's study, as composed as if he was still in a Peacekeeper's uniform instead of a Confessor's sackcloth and placard. After more than two years, the penitent garb was largerly a self-imposed punishment: Most Confessors had long since been allowed to trade the penitent garb for the jumpsuits of the Restorers. The official rationale was that they could better perform their generally menial duties in a functional uniform. Less officially, it was admitted that leaving them on display was upsetting to members of the public tired of reminders of the war. Those who continued to wear the sackcloth and card were increasingly regarded as at best masochists and at worst unreprentant offenders still willing to flaunt the suffering they had inflicted.

"You all know who I am," Thread said. "But you do not know me. I was a ten-year veteran of the Peacekeeper Corps and served for almost 30 years in civil administration. In both capacities, I had earned distinction- and no shortage of enemies- for loyalty, adherence to regulations, opposition to all forms of waste and corruption, and humanitarianism."

"And then you got a whip in your hand," Gale said.

"I enforced the letter of the law," Thread said. "I say that for myself, so you will listen to me. Now, let me begin by telling you a story, a story you have already heard, of the founding of the Ancients, the Cataclysm and the founding of Panem. The Ancients were the greatest of all humanity, if indeed they were truly and fully human. They were wise and beautiful, and they ruled with kindness, showering gifts on those who served them and even on those who vainly defied them, so that those who questioned their goodness were shamed into praising and serving them even more devoutly. So great were the Ancients that they could remake the surface of the Earth to their whims, and even conquer death itself. But their power was not as great as they thought, or else they themselves miscalculated and threw the forces they controlled out of balance, and the Cataclysm was unleashed, and the Ancients were seen no more. For decades and centuries, the land and the people were thrown into chaos, and it seemed that all would be lost, until the Founders opened the Storehouses of the Ancients, restoring the great city that is the Capitol and building Panem from the ashes.

"The story is not untrue. As President Snow used to say, that was what made it useful. Yet, at the same time, it is far from the whole truth. The simple fact is that the Founders of the Capitol were no wiser than the peoples of the Districts, then or since. They knew no more of the ways of the Ancients than anyone else. They simply had the opportunity, and perhaps a modicum of extra cunning and initiative, to try to unlock the Storehouses. Ultimately, they became, to draw on a jest I heard from the young lady, the racoons who found a can opener.

"Now, just think what the analogy entails. It is hard enough for the racoon to open the can. How much harder will it be, then, for the racoon to understand its surroundings, even if it can recognize the questions? Is the house a mansion in a great city, or a watchman's shack in a junkyard? Are the owners dead for years, moved away, gone on a journey, or only out for the night?"

"You're talking about living Ancients," Johanna said. "It's a pipe dream."

"Probably," Thread said. "Yet, how can we really rule it out? We know so little of the Ancients, and even less of what exists beyond Panem's borders. And then, the survival of the Ancients is only an extreme scenario. It would seem very safe to suppose that there are other Storehouses in existence, and eminently plausible that some could hold secrets even greater than those of the Capitol. It is also entirely plausible that there are other human populations outside Panem, who may have found some of these other Storehouses, and perhaps made greater progress in using them. It was debate over these very questions that contributed to the first Rebellion, one hundred years ago."

He held up a map showing two intersecting mountain ranges, forming the shape of a "y". On the east side was District 13. On the west was District Twelve, except the map showed a considerably wider area, which incorporated land that in living memory had been claimed by the Capitol. To the north, directly between the a valley shaded blue. "Even before the Rebellion, 12 was the smallest of the districts by population. But it had the benefit of representation on the Capitol's Advisory Council, a body of elected representatives from the Districts, and very close relations with District 13. District 12's counselors consistently voted with those of 13. One of the last votes taken before the Council was abolished was on whether to send an exploratory expedition into this region, which was known as..."

Gale spoke first: "Hobs Vale. There were places in the woods where we could see into it. Some people said that they saw things. Lights. People in strange dress."

"Yes, there were many stories, even then," Thread said. "The Capitol noted an additional datum." He held up an aerial picture of the joining of the two mountains, where the Town had been built in the midst of worked-out mines. To the north of Town, sprawling all the way past the fence, was a very dense forest with a single clearing, filled by the canopy of a tree with golden leaves.

"The Hanging Tree!" Peeta exclaimed. The others looked to him, and he said, "You remember Katniss's song. Well, she didn't even know until I told her, but there was a place we called the Hanging Tree. My father said it was because it grew up on the site of an old gallows. He said when he was young the kids would go do these rituals, until the Capitol moved the fence back. I went with some friends once to see if we could find a way past the fence, but the forest was too overgrown."

"What is it?" Victoria asked.

"I have absolutely no idea," Johanna said. "I'm guessing nobody else does, either."

"An analysis of the Capitol established that it is one of the so-called `muttations', a genetically engineered organism," Thread said. "It was theorized that it was bred for medicinal purposes, as it was found to produce fruit with opioid properties. The tree may well be the only one of its kind, as its seeds were found to be sterile. Its presence was considered direct evidence of a site of the Ancients, and the Capitol was absolutely against further investigation."

Haymitch laughed. "Of course they were," he said. "It wouldn't do for the other racoons to find a better can opener."

"Neither would it do for a racoon to look for pineapple and find a hand grenade," Thread said. "It was noted at the time that many of the reports of strange phenomena in the valley came from people who subsequently returned to the wilderness and never returned."

"What happened?" Gale said.

"The Capitol's refusal to launch an expedition marked an escalation in tensions between the Capitol and Districts, though it was by then a matter of a slight push on a slippery slope," Thread answered. "When the Council continued to press for an investigation, the Capitol retaliated by abolishing the Council, which was the last straw that brought the Districts to open revolt, beginning with simultaneous insurrections in Twelve and Thirteen. Twelve continued to make important contributions to the Rebellion over the 25 years it took for the Capitol to restore control, and suffered accordingly. At the cessation of hostilities, the District's population had been reduced to 15,000, and 80% of the District's territory was annexed by the Capitol. The survivors were rounded up for menial labor in coal mines whose automated equipment had been damaged or destroyed. The ensuing decades of neglect, mismanagement and outright malice by the Capitol's administrators ensured that the District continued to decline. Many factors contributed, but throughout that time, there was a steady stream of individuals, particularly the young and moderately rebellious, who ventured into the forests and simply vanished.

"It happened in cycles, usually one or two evey other year, but sometimes in larger numbers, with spikes every twenty-five years. It first came to the Administration's attention when a dozen disappeared at the first Quarter Quell. Recruitment by Thirteen was suspected, and this strengthened support for the Administration's consolidation of power. By the time a score disappeared at the second Quell, we were already convinced that something else was afoot. When fifty went missing in the Seventy-Fourth Reaping, the Capitol became truly alarmed. I was sent with express orders to learn as much as possible about the causes of the disappearances, and take all possible steps to prevent it."

"...And then you burned the District down," Gale said.

"Yes," said Thread. "At Snow's personal instruction, I gave the order to liquidate the District and destroy its urban centers... after three hundred Citizens disappeared."


	4. A Nice Name For Genocide

**This chapter is actually winding up the exposition for the story. I thought it might be worth mentioning that I have been drawing on classical mythology, ****_Inferno_**** and fairy lore for certain religious/ magical elements, and the tree in particular is influenced by all of the above.**

Gale cursed, Peeta gave a cold, hard stare, and even Johanna looked perplexed at his nonchalance. "`Liquidated,'" she mused. "Such a nice name for genocide."

"Do you think I am an animal, or a soulless machine?" Thread shouted. A single tear ran down his cheek. "Even if I was, do you think I would have put my name on a plan to obliterate 10,000 able laborers? I abhor waste above all else. I was emphatic in my reports to President Snow that the citizens of Twelve were skilled and adaptable, capable of endeavors far more profitable to Panem and themselves than inefficient and hazardous mineral extraction. What I proposed was a gradual relocation and reallocation of a gross surplus of civilian labor in District Twelve to duties as guest workers in the Capitol. This would have facilitated the Capitol's ultimate objective of restoring automation of the mines and annexing the remaining territory of the District as a military garrison."

"Then where did the bombing come in?" Gale said.

"That was an emergency contingency," Thread said. "I outlined in detail that limited tactical bombing could expedite a compulsory evacuation, with an overall reduction in loss of life. I compiled a list of locations of special economic, strategic or symbolic significance where those opposed to evacuation might attempt to take shelter or effect active resistance. I was very emphatic that this was to be conducted with conventional explosives only, and absolutely no incendiary ordinance. Once these locations were eliminated, the evacuees would predictably flee to other locations where Peacekeepers could wait to intercept them or round them up. We were waiting, when the fire bombs dropped. _300 of my own men died in those fires._"

"Sounds like Snow didn't really care for your plan," Peeta said, "or you."

"Perhaps," Thread said, "or perhaps the flyboys ignored their instructions because they liked a flash to go with their bang. What do you think Snow would have preferred- thousands of charred corpses, or thousands of live Citizens to use as he saw fit?"

Peeta did not answer. Nothing needed to be said: He had been taken captive himself, and knew very well what the Capitol could do with hostages. After a moment, he stood up. "Well, if we've been briefed, we might as well go out and survey the main point of interest."

The municipal motorcart was like a cross between a scooter and a bulldozer, with a single front wheel and tracks in the open-topped hull. Romulus Thread drove, Haymitch and Victoria were seated behind him, and the rest rode in a bench seat at the rear, with Johanna poised between Gale and Peeta. None ventured to speak as the municipal motorcart drove through the ruins of Twelve's northeastern urban zone where half the Capitol's bombs had fallen, except Thread.

"Now this, this is inexcusable waste in terms of ordinance alone," he said. He pointed to buildings that were not so much levelled as melted. . "The whole concept of tactical bombing is to apply limited force precisely where it will have the greatest effect on your enemy. Not much point in all that planning and precision if you are simply going to burn the scenery to a cinder! And what did they think they were accomplishing by hitting a designated target with a firebomb when it was already in another bomb's primary blast radius?"

"Shut up," Johanna said cheerfully, "or I'll eat your face."

"Be my guest," Thread said. "I could use a new one." But he was quiet thereafter.

They came to a halt at a thick stand of trees that obscured a swath of the fence. "This is the thickest part of the forest," he said. "It's like this all the way to the mountains, except for one clearing. We figured it must be a really old part of the forest."

"You figured wrong," Johanna said. "People who don't know anything about forests expect the trees to crowd together over time. What they don't understand is that plants are as competitive as any animal. Put a bunch of trees close together, and it's like the Hunger Games in slow motion: They stretch out their roots and branches until it looks like they're trying to strangle each other, and they are. They take sunlight, water and nutrients from each other, they poison each other, they even grow right over each other. The young and weak trees go right away, and the big and strong take each other out one at a time. In a real old growth forest, you get huge trees dozens of yards apart, and hardly anything in between. They showed us pictures of them in school. This, on the other hand, is secondary growth, no more than a few centuries old. I'm surprised it didn't burn."

"The plan called for sparing the forest," Thread said. "Even the flyboys managed to follow their orders. We predicted that once bombs started falling on the Joint, refugees who did not try to flee by the roads would run for the forests, expecting to be able to hide among the trees and use the branches to get over the fence. They would have quickly discovered what we already knew, that the forest was choked with impassable undergrowth and the trees too small for good climbing. Then they would either turn back, to be met by a deployment of peacekeepers, become stuck, or leave trails that could easily be followed. Like this one..."

A path three yards wide had been crushed through the forest, as if an enormous slug had plowed inexorably through the undergrowth. "We pulled thirty bodies out of here, mostly trampled," Peeta said. "There had to be more. Near as we can tell, they hit my parents' bakery and the mayor's mansion ahead of the main bombardment. It would have given everyone else time for a running start. I'm told that there's evidence a second wave came through."

Gail was already following the trail. "I'd say three hundred to five hundred people," he said. "Some of them had tools for clearing the brush. They cleared the fence." Two large trees had been felled, crushing a section of the fence. The trail kept going. He went on, and the others followed.

"Did you ever hunt in these woods?" Victoria asked.

Gail laughed. "Not if the ninth hell thawed out," he said. "I don't know about old growth and whatnot, but I know terrible hunting when I see it. Terrible line of sight, no more shooting range than you could get with a sharp stick, and nothing worth shooting at anyway. A wild turkey could get hung up in this. Besides which, too close to town." He looked back at Thread.

"Still, I came here once," Gale said. "I had heard stories about it around the Seam; down there they called it the Wishing Tree, and they really said it could make wishes come true. I was too old, then, to expect it to work, but I was young enough that I was willing to try it anyway. I jumped the east fence and spent a whole day going north. When I reached the tree, I did what they said: I jabbed myself with one of my arrowheads, wiped the blood on a rag, and left it at the foot of the tree. Then I went back to the mountains, and set up to rest for the night and go back home the next day. Then, in the night... It was probably a dream. But I saw light, pure white but soft, coming from under the branches. And I thought, somehow... I heard singing. That part couldn't have been real, of course. There's no way I could have heard anything from that far away, and of course, if I actually had, it would have to be loud enough to deafen everyone in town."

"Huh," said Johanna. "Hm. So... what did you wish for?" Gale was silent. "Did you get it?"

"Actually, I did," Gale said sternly. "I never really believed it was because of the tree. But what happened cost me a lot, and it cost a lot of other people a lot more."

He halted in his tracks. They had reached the clearing. It was ten yards wide, with a single tree in the center. Even after nearly 3 years, the earth bore the marks of scores if not hundreds of feet. But there was no trace of any track going out.


	5. Fighting Like A Tree

**Fair warning in advance, this chapter has some dialogue I would consider toward the edge in the ratings direction. More comments in the after note...**

Gale carefully surveyed the tree at the center of the barren clearing. It was easily seventy feet tall and surprisingly slender, with two graceful forks in its trunk. The bark was an almost shining white, and its loose canopy of leaves was tinted gold. Its fruit looked like miniature pomegranates, colored reddish-gold on the branch and crimson where they had fallen to the ground. Knee-high roots jutted from the base of the trunk, with a modest fissure between two of them, and further traces of exposed roots could be seen all over the clearing.

Johanna looked the tree over with something approaching awe or fear. "When I was training for the Games, my mentor told me, `If you want to win, you have to fight like a tree,'" she said. "If they let this one in, it could have been defending champion at the Thirtieth Quarter Quell."

"Cray wanted this tree destroyed," Romulus said. "Evidently, he was concerned about a bit of local legendry, known to be based in fact. A hundred years before the First Rebellion, there was a local uprising against the Mayor and Head Peacekeeper. By all indications, both men were exceptionally cruel and corrupt, and formed an alliance to exploit the populace. The Mayor also evidently enjoyed doing his own dirty work, and got himself and two offduty peacekeepers killed while raiding a widow's house. Per the story, the Head Peacekeeper hanged the `assassin', the widow's only son, in full view of a great crowd. But the crowd broke out of his control and overran the platform. The Head was either hanged on his own gallows or simply tied to the post, and the structure was burned to the ground with him and the young man he had hanged still on it. Supposedly, a sprouting seedling was discovered in the ashes the day after."

There was a moment of silence, and then Haymitch burst out laughing. "That is what Katniss' song was about!" he exclaimed. "She told us her mother had a fit over her father singing it. She thought it was because the song was so morbid, and boy howdy was it, all about a guy, executed for murder, calling for his girlfriend to join him at the Hanging Tree... But all of that was just code for joining a rebellion. I'll bet her mother knew it, too."

"So you found a muttation from the time of the Ancients," Gale said, "and you were ready to destroy it because of a story that made you uncomfortable?"

Johanna shrugged and sat down on a root that formed the edge of the fissure. "Plant muttations aren't uncommon," she said. "We found them in the forest all the time, some plant all by itself that nobody ever saw before, and we knew what it meant. A seed that could have been lying dormant for thousands of years had found just the right conditions to sprout. Usually, they would just die on their own. If not, we'd take care of them ourselves." She leaned back against the trunk, and all the branches of the tree seemed to rustle. "Yeah, you heard me, we would have taken care of you real fast."

He sat down on the next root over from Johanna. "I've been thinking about your story, and there's something I don't get," Johanna said. "Long as I've known you, and Katniss says as long as she has, you've been pretty much hung up on staying close to your Mama. I know, it's because you take care of her. So why'd you go out on a two-day trip? Did you at least tell her where you were going?"

"This was when my father was still alive," Gale said. "When he was around, people didn't worry about me."

"Interesting way of putting it," Johanna said. "Sounds to me like your Dad was an _interesting_ guy. Makes me wonder... was your wish about him?" There was dead silence. "So... what are we doing now?"

"I don't know what you're doing, and I can't say I care," Gale said. "But I'm going to stay here for a while. I just might stay the night."

"Then I just might join you," Johanna said.

"The more the merrier," Haymitch said, and sat down on the next root over from her. Victoria joined him on a fork of the same root. "How 'bout you, Peet? Need to get back home so Kat can get a good night's sleep?"

Peeta sat down heavily. "Actually, we haven't been doing that as much," he said. "She says she needs a bit of space to think."

"Yeah, I know how that goes," Johanna said. "You figure, what's the harm, nothing's happening, except _something_ is going to happen sooner or later because you're a guy, basic bio. Then one morning it's `Oh, Peeta,' then it's `Oh, Peeta...', and then it's `Oh, Peeta!'"

"And you'd know from experience," Gale said. Johanna laughed sardonically. Then she looked up, vaguely nonplussed, as an entrenching shovel gouged into the bark between them.

"This is madness!" Romulus shouted. He drove the shovel into the ground and pulled off the sackcloth. "You have seen the tracks of hundreds lead to this very spot, and disappear! And now you wish to stay overnight!" He jabbed a finger at Gail, just as if giving an order to an insubordinate soldier. "I forbid this!" Then, as if remembering his position, he said, "I refuse!"

"Well, then, drive back to the Village," Johanna said indifferently. "Nobody's making you stay."

"No!" Thread shouted. "I was given a mission. I must do my duty!" He jabbed the shovel into a root, drawing a flow of crimson sap. The branches rustled, and the very trunk swayed and creaked. A shower of fruit dropped down, breaking open and scattering juicy kernels. "I am sworn to uphold the law! I have vowed by the Heaven of Heavens and the Lowest Hell to protect the Citizens of Panem! It does not matter if what they must be protected from is their own madness! It does not matter if they would curse me, even if they would kill me! I must do my duty! I must protect! _I must not fail again!_" He paced ever more frenetically, crushing kernels and whole fruit into fragrant pulp, until finally he struck himself across the head with the shovel and fell to the ground.

Moments seemed to pass, but in every moment the light of the sun grew dimmer. "Should we help him?" said Peeta.

"Eh," said Johanna. "He's groaning a bit. Not even unconscious."

"I was just thinking of something," Victoria said, leaning against Haymitch. "I have heard stories... I don't know if it is true... of canaries in coal mines..."

"I know what you mean, but it'd never've worked," Haymitch said, putting an arm around her. "It cost less to get new miners than canaries."

"All right, but just working with the analogy... Romulus has just displayed a mental breakdown. Given his history and personality, this would be, in itself, unsurprising. Nevertheless, it would be hard to discount it as coincidence that it has happened at this precise time and place. I suggest a hypothesis: If some external agency were affecting our mental functioning, like the opioid properties of the fruit that thread mentioned, the members of our group who are less stable to begin with would, like the canary, succumb first. So perhaps we are all ourselves headed for a breakdown... or experiencing it already..."

"Shut up, mole woman," Johanna said, "or I'm going to come over there and eat you." She rose, just long enough to straddle Gale's lap. "You know, I really could eat your face... They called me `Maneater' just because of one little bite that was obviously reflex, and you know something?... It didn't taste like chicken." She kissed him, chewing on his lip, until Peeta lurched over, pushed her away, and lifted Gale by the throat.

"I'm going to kill you for what you did to her, you bastard," Peeta said.

Gale returned his hateful glare with mere puzzlement. "What do you mean? I made my case, I let her make her choice, and she chose you. I never tried to stop her. Hell, I brought you back to her!"

"Exactly," Peeta hissed, tightening his grip. "You brought me back, after everything they did to me, and she has to live with me. She has to wake up to me whimpering like a scared dog, and when she asks why the one thing I can't tell her is I remember seeing her turn into a mutt and tear my brothers to pieces!" Stars flashed before Gale's eyes, until he dropped with Peeta at the clang of the shuffle.

"Do my duty," Romulus said. He bent down to wipe a gash on Peeta's forehead, ignoring the blood from a more serious wound on his own temple. "Hold on... to the shovel." He gazed up with wild eyes at the branches, as more fruit rained down. Then he looked down at the fissure, and cackled. "I can dig you out!" Great clods of earth flew up. There was a clang.

Then there was light.

**This chapter is about where I was when I started posting this. Pretty much everything for the concept of the tree was originally in this chapter, and I was satisfied enough to change the title of the story and move some of my material forward to make the tree more prominent. Visually, the idea was a cross between an aspen, which I am familiar with from time living in northern AZ, and a mangrove, with an extra nod to the fictional woods of Lothlorien in LOTR. I will also mention that the story gets more Johanna-centric from here on in, I suppose because when I call the shots, crazy wins! **


	6. The Morning After

Gale gaped down at Katniss, laid out on the porch with the knife still in her chest. He was utterly shocked, yet the most shocking thing was that he wasn't feeling that much of the rage, grief or sheer terror that he knew ought to be expected under the circumstances. He looked at Johanna, and read off the cue cards that rose in his mind. "You can't Johanna Mason," he said. "Johanna Mason was a Hunger Games victor from District 7. You're Johanna Donner. Your mother is Maysilee Donner, from District 12, and you live with her and her father Jan, a little ways down the shore."

"Listen to me... Oh, to hells with that," Johanna said. She kissed Gale, hard, and bit the inside of his lip. "You tell me. Do you think I'm your neighbor's granddaughter?"

"We should take my wife inside," Gale said. He looked over his shoulder. There was no sign of Katniss. He looked in the open door, and somehow he was not surprised to see Katniss coming from inside with cups, a pitcher of tea and a loaf of bread on a tray.

"What just happened?" he said. He shook his head. "That couldn't have happened. People who get stabbed in the chest can't get up and serve tea. And even if they could, how could they be back in the kitchen just like that? So that didn't happen." As he spoke, his eyes lit on a knife beside the bread on the tray. It was the same knife Johanna had plunged into his wife's heart. But of course, that hadn't happened. But then again, he knew knives, and that was no bread knife, so where had it come from?

"Thank you, Katniss," he said. He took the tray and set it down on the table, turned back to kiss Katniss on the cheek, and cut her throat. Johanna was already running, and he followed.

They were into the tree line, and Gale noted that the trees were like nothing he knew, with gold-tinted leaves, brilliantly white bark, and reddish-gold fruit. "Have you ever seen trees like this before?" Johanna said.

"No," he said. Then, "Maybe. A couple times. I don't remember."

"Well, you remember this place, right? You do, I can tell. So do you remember these trees in this place?"

"I remember them when I came to live at this lake," he said. "But before that... no."

"And this isn't something you could have overlooked, is it? If you hunt, you have to know something about how trees work. A few trees could sprout in a season. A few dozen could crop up in a few years before anyone noticed. But these are hundreds of big trees, decades of growth at least. Do you think this could have happened in the place you remember?" He shook his head. "All right then, it's settled: You aren't where you think you are. Someone is trying to fool you. So what do you want to do?"

He was silent. "You're the Rebel, Gale! You're the hero of the Rebellion, and proud of it! If you can't remember, just look into my eyes, and see how I'm looking at you. So what do you think the person I see would do about being held in any place where you aren't allowed to know where you are or even remember what's really happened to you? I'd say he wouldn't just try to break out, he'd burn the whole place to the ground!"

At last, Gale spoke: "But, maybe, whoever is doing this thinks they're doing it for our own good. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're wrong for us, but right for other people, if there are other people. We have to find out more about this place. If we can, we have to find whoever's doing this, and try to communicate."

"All right," Johanna said. "It's the most reasonable thing to do. I hope you won't take it personal when I say, I would never have expected to hear it from you. So, really, the first thing is to figure out who else is in here with us, not to mention how to tell the difference between us and- for lack of a better word- them. The best part is, we can do that and still look like we've accepted this place. I say we start with Haymitch."

They headed in the direction of Haymitch's cabin. They were halfway there when they heard a call that made Johanna jump. "Johanna! Johanna, we were looking for you!" It was an old man's voice, slightly gravelly. A cue in his mind told him it was Jan Donner, Johanna's grandfather.

The old man really wasn't that old, probably not more than sixty, though that was old indeed by the standards of 12. He had a half-bald head and a bushy mustache that still held traces of blond. He moved with long, lurching strides that covered ground surprisingly well. Behind the cues, another picture rose of the same man, with rags of clothes hanging from his body and skin hanging from his bones. He had chased after Gale in what passed for the village square like a big, clumsy, over-friendly dog, and fallen to his knees in tears when Gale ran away on his little boy legs. Right behind the man was a woman of about 40, and the cue told him it was Maysilee Donner, co-Victor of the 50th Hunger Games.

"I'm pretty sure he's real," Johanna said quietly. "She isn't."

"Jo, you mustn't leave without telling us where you're going," Jan said. He closed in, just like a friendly dog, but Johanna stepped forward and met him, returning a long embrace, and pulling back her jacket so he wouldn't feel the knives concealed inside.

"We're going to see Haymitch," Johanna said. "I forgot to leave a note. I'm sorry." She looked at Gale from the corner of her eyes, and curled her lip at his nearly incredulous stare.

Haymitch's house was large by any standard, and huge for a cabin. The porch alone had as much square footage as the inside of the concrete cabin. A woman was on the porch, reading from a book. The cue told Gale that this was Haymitch's eldest daughter, but it was conspicuously difficult to imagine how they could be related. Her skin was very pale, and her face seemed almost stylized, with the generic beauty of the ceramic dolls Gale had seen a few times in town. "She doesn't look real," he whispered.

"I know, but I'm pretty sure we know her," Johanna whispered back. "Victoria..."

Victoria called inside, and Haymitch came out, following her happily to meet the guests. "Maysilee! Gale! Jan! Johanna!" he called out happily. "It's so good to see you. Come in!" Victoria just smiled and waved, taking frequent glances at Haymitch.

"He looks like he would have if he'd found something to smoke instead of drink," Johanna whispered succinctly. "She looks like a schoolgirl with a crush on the teacher. They're real."

"There's something else,"Gale added. "I think they both know this isn't real. But they're happy."

"He's happy. To him, going along with this place is no different than getting drunk. She looks like she could be happier." Johanna spoke aloud to Victoria: "So, Vic, I've been wanting to ask... Haymitch isn't you're real father, is he? I mean, it doesn't matter as long as he loves you, but still, I notice..."

"Oh, no, he's my real Dad," Victoria said. She blushed a bit. "Actually, he says I was a bit of a `close call'... Hm. It is funny. All my sisters look just like my mother."

They reached the doorway and entered. For a moment, Johanna froze on the threshold. "You're right. They look just like their mother." Four woman were seated at a long table. One was in her forties, the others looked to be in a range from 14 to 17. They all had different hair colors, but with allowance for age, their faces were identical.

"Hey, look," Haymitch said, "we've got one more guest." Gale knew, even before he looked: Katniss was coming.


	7. Magic Shovel

"This was wonderful," Katniss said, "but Gale, you really must come home. My family will be coming over by eleven." Gale looked to Johanna, and inspiration struck.

"Why do we have to go back home?" he said. "Haymitch has plenty of room left. They should come over here and join us."

"But they will be coming to our cabin," said Katniss, "and our food is already there."

"I know," Johanna said. "I can go back, tell your family, and get the food."

After a moment's pause, Katniss said, "That will be perfect."

Almost simultaneously, Maysilee said, "I will go with you."

Johanna followed a path through the forest outskirts. Maysilee did not protest or comment, which made Johanna more suspicious. The fragrance of the trees was strong, and she found it harder to remember things apart from the cues. It was ominous, but there was definite comfort there: After seeing Katniss appear and disappear, she had been considering very strongly the first possibility that occurred to her on finding herself in this place, which was that it not even a real "place" but something like the computerized simulations they had in the Capitol. But if the apparent environment was having physical effects on her that served the purposes of its designers, then she could be reasonably sure it was real.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the head of a shovel swinging for her face. She froze instinctively, and the shovel struck with a clang, against an unseen barrier inches from her face. "Thread," she said to the figure who stepped out from behind a tree.

"You know my name," he said. "I know you. Johanna. _Mason._ Yes! Have you seen a Mutt? I am looking for a Mutt. It is a very dangerous Mutt, the kind that hurts people. I must kill the Mutt, because it is my duty to protect the people. It is my duty to hold onto the shovel."

Johanna reached out, and found no resistance. She couldn't resist asking, "What does this Mutt look like?"

Romulus shrugged. "Anything," he said. "The Mutt can look like anything. I must be very careful. I must check everyone."

"By hitting them with a shovel?" Johanna exclaimed.

"No," Romulus said. "This is a magic shovel. It can only hurt a Mutt. If I swing at a person, it stops itself, because it is magic."

"That's not magic, and it's not in the shovel," Johanna said. "It's a force field that turned on to stop me from being hurt." She pondered, and then pointed at Maysilee. "I think she's the Mutt. Kill her."

Romulus took a look at Maysilee. "Of course she's a Mutt," he said. "But she's not _the _Mutt."

"Could you kill her anyway? I want to see what happens." Romulus advanced on Maysilee, who only stood silently. Johanna looked away. There were three blows og the shovel, the last of which brought a grisly pop. Romulus came back, holding up Maysilee's head. He pointed back to the rest of her. "Look away. It only happens when you look away. Look back, and you might catch it."

Johanna did as he said, keeping the body just outside her vision. She heard the faintest hint of a sound, and jerked her head back in time to see the last of a boneless mass disappear into the ground like an octopus down a small hole. She looked very intently, and saw grains of dust pouring into the last traces of a hole like sand in the funnel of an ant-lion. Much the same process was already covering up the last traces of blood. Romulus nudged her to look away, and tossed the head after the body. She looked as soon as she heard the head hit the dirt, but there was nothing left to be seen but a last, fleeting trace of a hole.

She looked back to Romulus. "I think I'm getting this," she said. "Whoever or whatever controls this place is trying to give people whatever they think they want most. Why? Who knows, and we probably don't need to. They- as good a word as any- put us in this place, with planted memories and a cast of Mutts to keep us happy. For some reason, that's very important to them, at least for the time being. We have to be protected from harm, so the Mutts aren't allowed to fight us even in self-defense. They're probably expendable anyway. If we try to hurt each other, they have the force fields. That gets me thinking, this whole place could be under a force field, just like a Games arena. In fact, I'm pretty sure the arenas were copied from something like this.

"Then there's the wishes. You were simple enough, all you wanted to do was play soldier, so they let you beat the bushes for a monster in paradise. I'd say that's just an extra bit of crazy they planted in your head, but then again, they could have made a special Mutt, just to give you something to chase. They gave Gale Katniss, or his ideal of Katniss. No telling what they did for Peeta, if he's in here. Haymitch they gave a family, all copied from his old girl that Snow killed, plus that poor mole woman they wrangled in. And me, they put with an old man and a Mutt playing his daughter, who actually died in the Games Haymitch won. That's different from the rest. For Haymitch and Vic, they probably thought it would fulfill some of the feelings that were between them. For me... My best guess is that they decided to kill two birds with one stone. That old man needed more than a Mutt for company, and I wanted to feel what it was like to be in a family... Oh, tell what I just said to Gale, and I'll eat you."

As they talked, footsteps came up the path. It was Maysilee, coming from the other direction, with a basket of food in hand. "I decided to go on ahead, and give you time with your friend," she said. "The Eberdeens will be coming soon." Sure enough, footsteps were coming behind, and then singing, a rich tenor that made the birds fall silent.

"Here," Johanna said, "I'll help you with that..."

The birds listened, until the singing stopped with a hoarse gurgle. Then the birds began to sing again.


	8. Reality Check

Katniss was making small talk with Haymitch's identical daughters when a shovel broke a window. Johanna kicked open the already-unlocked door. "Listen up," she shouted. "I have a dozen knives in my jacket and a lunatic war criminal with a magic shovel outside. You're coming with me, Haymitch Abernathy, or I will kill every one of these girls in front of you. They're all the same girl, you know that, and you will get to see her die all over again, and over, and over, and over. This place will bring her back, but I'll make sure you remember."

Haymitch only gazed at her sadly. "What are you doing this for?" he said. "We have a good thing. Why not ride with it?"

"I'm real, you're real, and I need your help," Johanna said. "I'm doing whatever it takes to get out of here, if I can. If it helps, look at it this way: If I can't do this, and the odds certainly don't look good, all that happens to you is that you get put back here."

Haymitch looked to the four faces of his girl. "Please don't leave us," they all said in unison. "We love you. We are all you ever wanted."

Haymitch shook his head. "I can't let anything happen to you again," he said, rising with his hands up. Victoria came immediately to his side. "It's not going to work, anyway. You'll see."

Johanna was jarred when the old man broke into tears. "Now what?" she snapped.

The old man looked up at her with those pathetic friendly-dog eyes. "Do... do you hate me?" he said.

She sighed. "No. You aren't a bad man. I think you're a nice man. I think I could like it if you were my friennd. I might even like it if you were my grandfather. But I can't be your granddaughter, because my mother didn't know who her father was any more than she knew mine, and your only child died in the 50th Hunger Games."

"I know," he sobbed. Johanna knelt down.

"Listen. We wouldn't have been put together if you didn't want someone real, and I do like you. So I'm asking you, please, come with me." He stood up, still sobbing, and burst out the door.

Johanna turned to Gale. "And you! Do we have to go over this again?"

Gale looked to Katniss, and a tear ran down his cheek. "You aren't even like her," he said. "Katniss would never be like you. You're like somebody's dream of what Katniss would be."

Katniss only looked him in the eyes and said, "But it was your dream."

Gale looked to Johanna. "Are you going to make me kill her again?"

"Oh, no," Johanna answered. "We're taking her with us." She took Katniss by the arm, and pushed her out the door. "I think we might want her with us, when we get to Peeta's house."

Peeta Mellark hummed to himself as he finished his breakfast, eating with one hand. The other was wrapped around the little girl in his lap. "Thank you, Daddy," Rosanna said as he gave her the last bite of a cheese bun.

"You're welcome," he said, kissing her on the forehead. "I love you... so much..." He looked up as his wife entered. "I love you too..."

"We should clean this up," Katniss said. "My sister will be coming soon."

The procession followed the edge of the woods, with Gale in the lead Romulus in the rear. Gale and Johanna whirled around at the clang of the shovel, to see him stooping over a flattened squirrel. "Are you the Mutt?" he said loudly. "Have you seen the Mutt?" Gale and Johanna exchanged glances. The cold glare of hate was rising in his eyes. Johanna only shrugged.

"Here's what I'm thinking," Gale said. "The picture I get is 1,200 inhabitants, and it checks out. As far as the balance of us to them, Haymitch's house has got me thinking that _they _don't want it to be more than about two to one. Maybe they did experiments to find the right balance for the real people to hold up at all. But I think it's a safe bet there's at least one Mutt for every human. They would need that, just to give everyone someone to want to stay for. So, it comes out as somewhere between 400 and 600 survivors in here.

"There's another thing: As far as I'm concerned, we have to figure on running into security measures we haven't seen. That force field you told me about is a nice trick, but there's too much that can go wrong with fields for it to be reliable, and we have to assume they know it. What makes most sense is a special type of Mutt capable of fighting, like a soldier ant among the workers... pretty close to what Romulus says he's looking for. He's off the deep end, and he could just be chasing a hob, but the idea makes too much sense to ignore."

"Well, how about we just ask?" Johanna said. She smiled and put an arm around Katniss. "Do you know? What can you tell us? How much do they tell you? Or is there even a `you', or just a puppet with them pulling the strings?"

"I would suggest that there is a more important question to be asked," Victoria said. "Is there, in fact, a `they'?

"Your questions are a matter for management," Katniss said. Then she dropped to the ground. Everyone staggered with sudden disorientation, and when they recovered, there was no trace of Katniss.

"The cues in my head... They're gone," Gale said.

"Maybe they're putting us on a different script," Johanna said.

"Hello, Gale," a cheerful voice called out. It was Dilly Cartwright, coming from ahead. "Are you coming to see Peeta?" Johanna tossed a knife. There was a flash as the weapon broke against a force field.

Johanna stared. "Are you real?"

Dilly smiled. "You could say I am Management."


	9. Middle Management

"So, they still won't do anything but send a Mutt," Gale said, "even if it is one they don't consider expendable."

"Citizen Hawthorne, I would like to outline a theory," Victoria said. "You are assuming that this facility is equivalent to a Games Arena, run by a Gamemaster and crew. But it is entirely possible, if not more probable, that those functions have been assumed by automation and artificial intelligence. As I already suggested, the presumed person or persons you call `they' may not exist. It may only be this `Place' and any agents it creates."

"Management wishes it to be known that every effort is being made to ensure your happiness and contentment," Dilly said in her usual singsong. "Any complaints or requests you may have will be treated as matters of highest priority."

"We want to leave," Gale said. "We want you to let everyone go."

There was a pause, and then Dilly said, "Your request will be forwarded to Administration."

"Where is Administration?" Gale snarled.

"Management cannot comment at this time," Dilly said.

"They're dead," Johanna said. "Vick's right. `Management' is an automated system. `Administration' was the Ancients, and they are all dead."

"Administration has no comment at this time," Dilly said flatly. Then the singsong tone returned to her voice: "Gale, would you like us to improve on your current partner? Rest assured, we can make adjustments to the next edition. Or, we can make you married to Johanna. Johanna, you would be very satisfied with this, would you not? Or, if Gale desires it and you are amicable, we could arrange a polygamous partnership..."

Johanna lunged headlong with a knife in either hand, only to slam into the force field and fall with a bloody nose. A smear of blood hung in the air for a moment, then dropped to the earth as the force field dematerialized. "Please do not do that again," Dilly said. "You have injured yourself. You are instructed to return to your designated homes fo the day. If you refuse, it will be necessary to summon Security."

As she spoke, they all realized that the birds had fallen silent. Romulus raised the shovel and shouted, "Mutt! The Mutt! _Run!_"

"Nice," Johanna said as she rose. She circled Dilly at a brisk walk, ready to run into a forcefield, but it never came. "This Mutt kept us talking while another one closed in."

There was a rustle from the trees, and six squirrels came running out into the open 30 yards back. Romulus looked ready to charge into the bush, but he stayed close to the others, shouting,"Mutt! Mutt! Run! Run, you fools!" He looked over his shoulder, revealing tears streaming down his cheeks. "Why didn't you just run?"

Jan picked up the two knives Johanna had dropped, and moved to Romulus's side. It was clear from the stance he assumed that he had more than ample experience with the blades. "Go, all of you," he said, looking Johanna directly in the eye. "I will remember you."

As the rest hustled off, Jan began to sing "Hanging Tree", but in a fast and unmistakeably martial tempo. There was crashing from the brush. "Don't look back," Haymitch said, before giving Victoria a push and turning back himself. There was a thunderous roar that could have been the bellow of a tremendous beast or an awesomely powerful blast of wind, just as Romulus gave a scream and Jan sang a coda:

"We may grow old or we may die young- but we will all be together at the Hanging Tree!"

Gale and Johanna burst out of the trees, yards away from the front porch of Peeta's house. Johanna waited just long enough to pull Victoria clear. The mole woman was so badly winded that Gale carried her to the front steps, while Johanna ran ahead. She drew her biggest remaining knife before pounding on the door. "Who is it?" said a female voice. Gale reached the top of the stairs and froze.

"That's Prim," he said. "Please... put it away."

"I'm glad you could come," Peeta said. "I'm sorry my wife had to step out."

"Right, your wife," Johanna said. "Who would that be?" Peeta paused, looking uncertain. "Katniss. Isn't it? Except, it's not. All of this is an illusion created with Mutts. You know about Mutts. I'll tell you something else: You did marry Katniss, but you never had a kid. You made that up to drum up sympathy when they sent you both to the Third Quell. But I guess you really wanted it to be true, because this place made it so. I'm guessing you also think you both came straight here after she blew out the force field on the arena, and you settled down and had the kid instead of being tortured and brainwashed until you were ready to kill her."

"But... Prim's here," Peeta said. They looked to Katniss's sister, who was talking to Gale and Victoria, with Rosanna curled up in her lap. He looked back, clearly puzzled and troubled. "She...she seems real. And there's Rosanna..."

Gale waved the two women down the hallway. "We have a problem," Gale said. "If I didn't know better, I would think Prim was a real survivor. I'm still not sure what she is."

"I believe Rosanna is real, though it's harder to judge for a child," Victoria said. "By the same token, however, a child would probably be harder to simulate. The simplest explanation is that Rosanna is an actual survivor, presumably an orphaned infant, which Peeta has been conditioned to accept as his own child."

"I have an idea about Prim," Johanna said. "Gale, remember that cheesy fantasy film, when we dressed up forty extras to represent the goblin army in the life shots? The first eight were what the makeup people called `heroes'- they had really detailed costumes, and weapons good enough to hurt someone. They were always up front, where they would actually tussle with the real stars. The rest were just goofy rubber masks and foam axes, and it didn't matter because they weren't close enough to the camera. I think Prim's like that... They just did extra work."

"It is also possible `they' had better material," Victoria said. "I have been giving some thought to your description of the wishing ritual. It sounds like the perfect arrangement for the covert collection of DNA samples. A fresh blood sample could be used as the basis for a fully functional clone."

Gale nodded. "I thought about that, with the Hunger Games. Katniss complained about how much of her hair they pulled out. They told her it was to make her look good for the Capitol viewers, but if they saved it, they could have had her cloned."

"So, you think Prim could pass as real?" Peeta said. They all started. "And you're afraid to tell me that? Don't be. I'll tell you the one thing that matters: If this place can do that, there's only one thing we can do... Burn it to the ground."

Just then, there was a very loud knock at the door. Gale and Johanna moved toward the door, just in time to see a wooden bar slide spontaneously back and the lock undo itself. The door swung open, and in stepped... "You?" Gale shouted.

"I can be anyone I want to be," said President Snow.

A second figure stepped inside. "I can also be as many of me as I want to be." It was Gale's father.


	10. Hollow Paradise

Johanna shifted, trying to get a better look at the figure of President Snow. He looked just like he did in television interviews, which she suspected was what his likeness was copied from. That would explain why parts of him which would only show in brief distance shots, like his feet, seemed somehow fuzzy compared to the rest of him. Then there was the back. She couldn't be sure, and she certainly wasn't going any closer to find out, but it looked like there was a hole in his back. "Let us go," Gale said. "All we want is for you to let us go."

"But we cannot do that," Snow said. "We are here to provide you with health, peace and happiness. If you are unhappy and want to leave, then we have failed and must redouble our efforts. If you resist, even threaten to prevent us from giving health, peace and happiness to others, then we have little choice but to discipline you."

Johanna hurled a vase, which broke against a shield that cut off the end of the hallway from the living room., trapping everyone but the little girl "That's the kind of thing the guy you made your puppet from used to say," Johanna said, "right before he tortured and murdered us."

"We present ourselves in whatever likenesses will draw the appropriate emotions," Snow said. "My responsibilities require me to be feared and respected, therefore I take this shape." He leaned down to talk to the girl: "Rosanna... why don't you go play at Aunt Twill's?" The girl scampered out.

Gale pointed a finger at his father. "What about him?" he said. "I never respected him."

"Oh, but you respected me just fine, boy," said his father. The man looked like an ogre out of a fairy story, tall yet very stout, with coarse stubble all over his face, a hatchwork of scars and a patch where one eye had been. He removed a huge belt. "I just had to learn you to mind."

Gale tensed. Johanna stepped closer, discretely slipping a hand inside the crook of his arm. "He can't hurt you. He's a part of this Place, and the Place won't let us be hurt," she said. She spoke directly to the Mutt. "You can't let us hurt each other, so you can't hurt any of us. So what's the point of this?"

"To be sure, we cannot hurt you," Snow said. "But we can hurt them." He pointed to Prim, and another, a boy who couldn't be more than 14. The newcomer was gangly, with a faceful of freckles as well as a rash, but there was no mistaking his identity: It was Gale, as he had been when he came to make a wish at the Hanging Tree. The boy quivered at the very sight of the belt, yet he did not run from the lash.

"I'll teach you to mind, boy!" his father snarled. The belt lashed again and again, and Johanna could feel her Gale quiver every time. The boy was silent, at first, but the blows came faster and harder, until he whimpered. Then the force and tempo redoubled, until the boy was screaming and weeping, and still the blows came harder. Johanna held her eyes on the profile of the grown man, trying to discern what was happening in his psyche. It was not only the lashes but the boy's cries that made him wince. She knew that this was not just remembered pain, but enduring humiliation, and rage too, at being unable even to deny his father the pleasure of a cry. As she watched his teeth clench, she realized that he was not just feeling old wounds, but a fresh and selfish hurt at having his most secret pain witnessed by a rival he had lost a girl's heart to, and_ her_.

"You were a boy, and he was a grown man," Johanna whispered. "No, I take that back: He was a nasty little boy who happened to grow himself a man's body."

Peeta put a hand on Gale's shoulder. "You endured worse than this for the Rebellion, and Katniss, and me," he said, "and we never gave you anything but honor for it. Nothing will change that."

But Gale only stared, murmuring: "No, please, not this..."

The boy was reduced to sobbing, and his father raised the belt for more whipping. Then another figure materialized, whom Johanna recognized as Gale's mother Hazelle, almost ten years younger and very pregnant. She tried to restrain her husband, and he countered savagely, directing several blows against her belly before the boy cried out, not in pain but sudden defiance: "Stop! Stop it or I'll kill you! I swear I will! I'll wish you dead!" Then the man Gale dropped to his knees and then his face.

Johanna dropped to his side. "Holy hells, Gale," she said, "you blame yourself for that? You know it wasn't your fault, but who could blame you? I would want to kill him myself. No, I take that back: I would have." She looked to Victoria, who was checking doors to either side and a window behind them. The mole woman shook her head and reached for an open door. Her hand was blocked by a force field.

"You don't understand," Peeta said. "Ligeus Hawthorne died in a mining accident. A lot of people did. One of them was Katniss' father..."

Two more newcomers appeared, and Peeta stiffened. One was a boy who could only be his brother. The other was Katniss, and it was clear at a glance that this was not the same "edition" that had been given to Gale, but a far more faithful likeness. Johanna herself felt a moment's satisfaction at this, the surest proof that Gale never belonged with her. But Peeta stared in utter horror. "I remember this," he said, "I can remember it and it's not shiny! I think it happened! I give up! I'll be good, I'll do anything, just don't make me see it!"

"I'm afraid that will be insufficient," Snow said. "Your infraction was worse than the others'. They only wanted to leave and take others with them. You wanted to destroy us, and deprive all the world of the peace and happiness we can give." As he spoke, Katniss smiled, and as she smiled, a metamorphosis began. Her skin became pale, and broke out in something like a rash. Her lips stretched back, her chin grew longer and her brow receded. Her hair fell in patches and then sloughed off like an unsecured wig. Limbs, neck and torso stretched and narrowed. Her skin became white, and the rash became irridiscent scales. Clothes came off at a few swipes of a clawed hand, revealing the full form of _Ophis sapiens_, the perfect melding of humanity and serpent, yet still an unmistakeable likeness of Katniss.

"I think I knew it," Gale said. "The Mutts Snow sent to kill Katniss in the Capitol were cloned from her. His idea of irony, or maybe it was his way of sending her a message about herself..." He pushed Peeta to the wall, just as the Ophidian struck with distended jaws and the double of his brother screamed, a shrill shriek that went on and on. When the body finally thudded to the floor, the Ophidian smiled, and its smile was Katniss' smile as it advanced on Prim.

"You stinking Mutt!" Johanna snarled. The Ophidian paused and looked at her like a snake might look at a baby mouse dancing at the mouth of its hole. "You say you don't want to hurt us, but why else would you do this?"

Snow held out his hands. "So we can make everything better..."

Everyone stared in incredulity, but Victoria looked thoughtful. "I have another theory," the mole woman said. "The intellects of the Ancients were far beyond ordinary humanity, if they were truly and fully human. But higher mental faculties do not come without the price of sensitivity and volatility. A racoon might be hard-pressed to open a can, but it does not make a noose to hang itself. The Ancients could have been subject to emotions, stresses and outright psychoses as far beyond our comprehension as their science. It would follow that they would have developed means to treat their disorders. I would postulate that this place was built for that very purpose. It was, to use succinct colloquialism, their insane asylum."


	11. Soul Asylum

"Damn it to the frozen hell... it makes sense," Johanna said. "What this Place does could have been the Ancients' idea of therapy. They won't let us go because we haven't been cured. But then their standard of sanity is whatever the Ancients set up for themselves. Applying it to us would be like trying to teach raccoons to do calculus."

"It's worse than that," Peeta said. "The Place gives people a chance to live out their dreams. After what's happened out there, that's all a lot of people would ever want. They would never leave, they would never want to leave, even if they were supposed to. Katniss... If she knew of this Place, even knowing what it really was, she would come, and she would never leave. Not even for me."

"Ms. Mason," Snow said, "your case has presented special challenges for us. Not only have we faced a dearth of reference material, but we have found almost no signs of any emotional attachments, except one."

"No," Johanna said. "Don't you dare." But things were already changing. The Ophidian was changing back into Katniss, and the boy Gale was growing into a man. When the transformation was done, they stood in too-fancy uniforms with fahionable soot on their cheeks, Rebels' Rebels in a ridiculously overproduced propo. They waved, and then they kissed, basking in their own artificiality. Johanna snorted. "Please. I could eat her for lunch, and I could get him to eat the leftovers."

Then Katniss was gone, and the likeness of Johanna was in her place, in a wedding gown next to a now-clean Gale in a perfect dress uniform. Johanna felt satisfaction again, but she didn't care for the way her double cuddled against the groom, and she didn't care for being in a dress. She didn't like it any better when the double started removing the gown. "Stop," she said. Though she had freely shown her body to both of the men present, a flush of embarassment came to her cheeks. The double of Gale was looking hers over as they talked with lips flapping silently, and she knew every look. "Stop it." Beside her, the real Gale was looking shamefaced at the floor. Their doubles kissed, and Johanna braced herself for what would come.

But what she expected never came. Rather than removing his clothes, the groom Gale turned and accepted his father's belt, repeating what the ogre whispered in his ear: "I'll teach you how to mind, woman." The whip lashed and lashed again, and again.

She jerked the real Gale's head back, expecting some outcry or display that would convince her that the scene they beheld could never happen. But disbelief was the one thing she didn't see in his downcast face. "You bastard, if you ever even thought of doing that to me-" He tried to back away, but bumped into the force field.

Gale's father was at his ear. "I expected better from you, boy," the father-Mutt said. "I gave you everything I could, and you gave back more than I could have hoped for. I knew what you did, and I was proud of you, boy! That was how I knew I'd given you what you needed. Guts. Grit. Hate. What in all hells happened to you, boy? You let yourself moon over the first wench who catches your eye, and then lose her to a Townie sprat. Then you run into this one, and instead of breaking her in or cutting her loose, you just let her hang around like a pest. And now you let her talk to you like that! Didn't I tell you, boy, a mouth on a woman is like squeak on a wheel. You just gotta give a little-"

"Lubrication, I get it!" Johanna snarled. She raked her nails across Gale's face. "He's just saying what you're thinking, isn't he? I can't believe I fell in love with you!" She raked her nails across his face.

"Do not do that, or we shall have to use aversive measures," Snow said.

Johanna stared at the scratches on Gale's face and the blood on her nails, and then she looked in his eyes, and it seemed that what she saw was the terrified boy looking back. "You bastard. You utter bastard!" She shoved him down the hallway, and as she did, she whispered in his ear, "I'm getting us out of here." He nodded. Then she slammed him into the force field in front of the window, drew a knife and thrust for his heart. The knife shattered against a new force field that delivered an electric shock, and it seemed that the ground shook. Peeta and Victoria caught Johanna as she staggered back and then pushed her toward Gale, who was already crashing through the window.

Johanna landed in Gale's arms, and did not protest when he proceeded to carry her over his shoulder. "It was my guess, and I was pretty sure you were getting the same idea," she said. "You said force fields weren't reliable, and that got me thinking, and I thought I remembered hearing Beetee say once... that intersecting two force fields causes a short circuit."

Peeta passed them, and even Victoria was catching up. "Did you mean what you said?" Gale asked.

For a moment, she was merely bewildered. "Heavens' sakes," she said with rolled eyes, "we're on the run in a Mutt madhouse, and that's still the first thing you ask... But yes, Gale, it was true, and I'm pretty sure it still is. By the way, nice as it is to have your hands on my legs, I can run on my own now." Gale set her down, kissed her, and gave her a slap on the hip. She slapped him back, and they both started running.

"You realize this is entirely futile," Victoria said. "We are dealing with an adversary who can appear in any form from anywhere. The only logical explanation why we are still at liberty is that Security is already preparing a more optimal trap for us."

"Yeah," Johanna called back, "but you're still running."

They followed a kink in the shoreline, where the lake formed an inlet around a tiny island. "Have you noticed something?" Peeta said. "There are no boats on the lake. No docks. Or fishermen."

Gale pondered. "There are no fish in the lake," he said, "and there are no boats because there are no docks, and there are no docks because... because there are no boats. That's all."

"Exactly," Peeta said. "He pointed ahead, to a narrow path through an overgrown stretch of forest that went right up to the shore. "Where we want to go is Twill's house. Right through there."

"And that's the trap," Gale said.

"What do we do?" Johanna asked. Her eyes followed Gale's to the water, and she shuddered.

"I think," Gale said, "we walk in." He took her arm, and they walked hand in hand toward the path, while Victoria and Peeta headed for the shore. A gust of wind shook the trees as their feet touched the path, crunching a thick litter of dead leaves under foot. Gale looked at Johanna, and she halted and kissed him. They were still kissing as the leaves rose in a swirling, roaring mass that lunged in to engulf them. A great swirling cloud lifted them and swirled them about like rags in a washer, and they clung to each other even as their clothes were pulled from their bodies. A maelstrom of Hell stripped them of their senses of surroundings, of time, of their very selves, and still they drew tighter and tighter together.

Gale awoke with a woman in his arms. He said without looking, "Johanna." He looked down into wide eyes that were already gazing at him. "I think they didn't make it."

**An after note: For the record, the Ophidian is meant to represent a creature from ****_Mockingjay_****, but is also modeled after an old concept I sketched for an all-original book. I always thought the original looked like an evil muppet, but it's scared people. I still have a bit of a "lead" in terms of chapters, and am headed for a resolution. I'm going to go ahead and say that, while I don't normally get a lot of reviews and I don't generally mind, if anyone wants to review or "fav" this story, it would probably help with visibility in this fandom, and now is probably a good time.**


	12. Mutt Hunt

**This chapter brings Snow back in the mix, and he's going to be in place for the duration. I don't recall how he was portrayed in the movie, but when I write for him, I picture George Sanders (the voice of Shere Kahn in ****_The Jungle Book_****): Aristocratic, cruel and bored.**

Johanna wrapped a sheet around herself as she rolled out of bed. "You know," she said, struggling to think past a cloud of messages that pressed in within her mind, "I think you're the only man I've ever covered up for."

"I think," Gale said groggily, "you're the only woman I've ever taken everything off for." He took out a pair of shorts from a dresser within arm's reach of the bed, and put them on before rising. They were in a 12-by-12 concrete room, with a 7-by-5 bed in the middle. The functional metal dresser and a desk were literally wedged in at the corners, made in the shape of right triangles to fit better in their niches. What looked like a corner closet was actually a lavatory.

Johanna went into the lavatory to shower. Gale threw the metal shutters of the single window and looked out. He beheld a gray landscape in a gray haze, ending in the near distance at a forest of skeletal trees on some kind of steep slope. Already, his mind was telling him the story. The Rebels had swept to the streets of the Capitol, capturing President Snow alive. But Snow had left a final plan in place. Automated systems beneath the Capitol had launched hundreds of nuclear missiles at every District, and 13 had retaliated in vain. Only a handful had managed to escape to a secret shelter in the wilderness outside of Twelve, where they awaited any sign that the Earth had or ever would become habitable again. It was him and Johanna, with their comrades Haymitch, Peeta and young Prim, plus Peeta's daughter Rosanna, a District 13 mole woman named Victoria, and their prisoners.

Johanna emerged from the lavatory, and Gale showered while she dressed. The lavatory was essentially a very modest shower stall, with a toilet and shower that folded back into the walls when the shower was in use. As he emerged, a chime sounded, and a screen on the wall beside the door came to life. "Good morning, Mr. Hawthorne," said President Snow. "How are the two of you enjoying the Presidential Bedroom?"

"Go to hell," Gale said.

Snow chuckled. "I believe the evidence would favor the interpretation that we are already there. And you could be nicer to me. It wouldn't do if I became despondent and started flipping switches."

"Right," said Gale.

"I suppose you'd feel better if this room was wired for video."

"Oh, I'm quite above anything so tawdry," Snow said. "Though, I found the audio from last night perfectly intriguing. If you like, I could play it back for you and the lady privately."

Gale laughed openly. "Thanks, but I don't think so," he said.

"It wasn't like this," Johanna said. "It's not supposed to be like this... But it's harder to remember."

There was a banging at the door. "Eat and suit up, Hawthorne!" called out the voice of Romulus Thread. "We must search for the Mutt!"

The floor plan of the shelter was a T shape, with the Presidential Bedroom and the main control room at either end of the upper corridor. Snow was locked in the control room, and he had made it clear that he had no intention of coming out under any foreseeable circumstance. Fortunately, he could do nothing from there but annoy his fellow survivors, unless it was by shutting down the life support systems. Since the control room was as dependent on said systems as the rest of the shelter, his trump card was largely an idle threat. Romulus waited for Gale with a noticeably battered entrenching shovel he carried for no apparent reason. Gale followed him twelve feet to the main corridor.

The main corridor went for fifty feet, with four doors on either side. Four were bedrooms, with bunks for six people each, and the others were the library, dining area, and storage and utility rooms. Gale found the dining area occupied by Haymitch and Victoria, who greeted him with only sad and vaguely resentful glances. He took his morning meal from the vending machine in the corner and an extra ration to take with him, quickly ate his food, and then went with Thread to the end of the hall, the decontamination room.

Romulus and Gale emerged from the far side of the decontamination room into the gray lanscape, dressed in radiation suits. The Peacekeeper wielded a shovel, and Gale carried a gun. Gale looked back to see the door close, leaving no trace of itself in the face of a cliff. He went forward a few paces and looked back again. The cliff went off to the left, where it graded into the slope with the dead trees, and stretched upward for at least thirty feet, where it disappeared into something like a white blanket of cloud.

Thread was already marching to the right, to the edge of the cliff. This proved to mark the edge of a wider, deeper basin, filled with the dead trees. "What are we doing?" he said to Thread.

"Hunting the Mutt," Thread answered.

They spent all day tramping through the waste. Every fifteen minutes or so, Thread would jab with the shovel and shout "Mutt!", then run after some noise or point to an equivocal broken branch or trace in the dust. Meanwhile, Gale kept looking at the contours of the slope. He was sure they were in a dry lake bed, and he kept getting pictures of a lake shore.

After a while, he lost sight of Romulus, but continued to follow the sound of his feet, until the sound stopped. "Romulus?" he called out, moving toward where he had last heard the steps. There was no sign of the other man. There was no sign of anything. Then he heard a sound. Then, a voice, calling his name. It was Katniss.

"Katniss, is that you?" he called out.

"Yes, it's me," came the reply. Then he could see her, and he ran to her. "Katniss, I thought you were dead! You married Peeta and had Rosanna, but then- You didn't make it here."

"Of course I'm alive," she said as she approached. "I'm yours..."

"Katniss... I need to tell you something..." He froze. Another figure was approaching.

"What's wrong?" Katniss said. "I said I'm ready for you. It doesn't matter that I was with Peeta. It doesn't matter if you are with someone else. We can work it out." But Gale only stared as an identical figure approached behind her, smiling and changing. The first Katniss looked back, just as the Ophidian shed its clothes. She only stood, not fighting or even screaming as she was torn apart piece by piece, while blood spattered his suit.

The ophidian smiled as Katniss's head slid slowly down its throat. "Gale," it said in Katniss's voice, and then it was Katniss. "We should have been together, Gale. If we had helped each other when we needed it, we would be together now. But it's not too late, Gale. Come back to me, Gale, because I need you. I need your help."

"No," he said. "I can't go back. I've lost too much. I have to stay away."

"Come with me, Gale," Katniss said. "We can be together. We can _all_ be together. You and me and Prim..." She began to sing, "`We will all be together at the Hanging Tree."

"No!" Gale shouted, and for a moment, he was aware of nothing but the roar of his gun on continuous cyclic fire. When he came back to awareness, Thread was crashing to him through the bushes. He looked down, expecting to see a bullet-riddled corpse at his feet. Nothing was there, except a slight disturbance of a hole filling in the dust.


	13. Playback

Johanna met Gale with a kiss, just outside the decontamination room. Romulus trudged by, carrying his shovel. "Why is he allowed to take the shovel inside?" Gale muttered. "If there's really radioactive contamination out there, that thing should be hot as all Hells but one!"

"Hush," Johanna whispered. "You aren't supposed to be asking questions."

"He shot the Mutt," Romulus said around a mouthful of flavorless rations. "But the Mutt cannot be hurt by bullets. Only by this shovel, because it is a magic shovel." He waved the weapon with his free hand. Gale said nothing. He was struggling to remember what had happened himself.

"Rosanna was a good girl today," Prim said. "We were in the library, and she was learning to count from the page numbers in the old books. She also told me the names of birds."

"Yes," President Snow said, "I was perfectly charmed myself. Mr. Hawthorne, you might be interested to know that Johanna dropped in. She is clearly quite taken with Rosanna, and the feeling seems to be quite mutual." Rosanna giggled, and Peeta managed a smile. Johanna just blushed.

Gale looked at Haymitch. "What did you do today?"

"Victoria and I were looking at the machinery in the utility room," he said. "We also talked to Snow. He actually gave us some help. I guess those cameras pick up a lot, and he's been nice. He could almost pass as human."

"High praise, under the circumstances," Snow said. "But I was simply doing my part for out common interest. I am, after all, as dependent on this shelter's systems as you are."

People left by ones and twos. Thread went to the storage room next door, and they heard banging and the hiss of a welding torch. Prim took Rosanna to bed, and Peeta left soon after. Haymitch rose, chivalrously offered her his hand and escorted her back to the ladies' room. When they were alone, with Thread still working, doing something with a chain, they rose and went back to the bedroom. They climbed onto the bed, without undressing, and spent a while looking awkwardly at each other.

_Can you read lips?_ Gale mouthed. Johanna nodded. _We both know why we're here. We're being punished, for wanted to go back where we belong. It's like solitary in a prison, or a quiet room at a preschool._

_There's something else,_ Johanna mouthed back. _In here, it feels real. Like, the machines in the utility room looked like a real generator and life support machinery. Kiss me. Make some extra noise. Start taking my clothes off._

Gale complied. _Then what we want to find is somewhere else,_ he said. Then he spoke aloud, just a whisper: "Snow. Can you hear me?"

The screen came on. "Of course," Snow said.

"How about you play that recording you mentioned?"

"I would be happy too... just in your room, of course."

"Of. Course." Gale drew closer to Johanna, and she started to remove his clothes. Soft sounds came from the speaker, kissing, sighing and murmuring, then a gasp from Johanna.

"Just hold me, Gale," her voice spoke from the intercom. "Just hold me, and I'll know who I am." In the flesh, Johanna blushed. "Tell me who I am, Gale. Tell me who I am to you."

Gale's voice said in reply: "I think... you're the only woman I ever loved."

Johanna's laugh came in stereo, from the intercom and from the bed. "Gale, that's the most pathetically hyperventilated line a guy's ever said to me," she said in the recording. "Try to convince me it's true. Oh, how about you tell me how we met? I was too out of it to remember anything for sure, but I get flashes, especially... I didn't think this was real, but I have this picture of you, leaning right over me, and above you it's the ceiling of my cell... Were you in there?"

"Yeah, I went in myself while the team was taking care of Peeta. I was taking a good look to be sure it was you. Hells, I was ready to double check that you were a woman. Then you looked at me and said my name, and... you kissed me. Oh, and then somebody shot me."

"Ouch. You know why I knew your name? You were the item all over the Capitol. Seriously. I know for me it was crush at first sight. So then we end up in the same hospital, and you were dropping in, and as soon as I could get up, I was trailing you all over... Oh, and do you remember the first time Katniss saw us together? I was visiting her when she got her spleen shot out, and you dropped in, and I got up and got a feel for the goods on the way out... I swear, I thought she was going to try to kill me! Seriously, what was the real deal with her? A girl's got to have the dish on her competition."

"Well, what really brought us together was that neither of us ever wanted to get married. She had her reasons, and you've seen mine. That made us feel safe opening up to each other. After she went to the Games, that changed, and I thought it meant she wanted more from me. What it came down to was that I felt like I owed her something, and I could only see two ways to balance things out: marry her or die for her. When the war ended, and Paylor was elected peacefully, the only thing I could think was, I had missed my only real chance- to die doing something good instead of turning into my Dad. I only took the job in Two because I had nowhere else to go, unless it was home."

"But I was in Two. I got you that offer."

"Yeah, I knew it, and I thought that was my best reason not to go. I was more scared of you than I've ever been of anyone. At first, I thought I was just fresh meat to you, and that was bad enough. But when you kept at it, all the times you followed me or pulled a favor to get me to come to you, I knew there was more to it, and I couldn't understand what else someone like you would want from me. I finally gave in because I hoped I could figure you out. But I don't think I ever did."

Johanna laughed again. "Well, I guess you could say, what I really wanted you for was... breeding stock. Oh, not like that, though I can't say it didn't cross my mind. Up till I met you, I did treat men like fresh meat, and that was because the only thing I had to aim for was living to see the next morning. But with you, I got to thinking about the day after that. So I gave up on everything else, just to set you up in a pasture. You gave me the happiest three months of my life. But then you jumped the fence, and it broke my heart, but by then, I loved you too much not to let you go. I let you move on, but I didn't."

"Seriously? I left because I thought you didn't want us to tie each other down!"

There was the sounds of tears and laughter simultaneously, mixed with more than a few kisses. "I didn't, Gale. I admit it. But I was wrong. I hurt myself, and I can see now, I hurt you even more. I'm sorry." There was the sound of a long kiss, then many more.

"You realize... they won't let us remember this. They're just playing with us, maybe letting us improv while they come up with a new script."

"Well then, we're going to have to do something really hard to forget..."

Gale gave a wordless cry of pleasure, but then shouted in anger: "No! This is just playing into their game. They want us to feel like we belong together, because we will remember that feeling even if they don't let us remember anything else. Then they can make us feel like we belong in whatever script they put in front of us, just by putting us together every time."

Johanna said through tears: "But it's a real feeling, Gale! I always felt it. Don't tell me you don't feel it too! And haven't you asked yourself, what if they want this because it really is what's best for us? What if they they saw something we've been denying to ourselves, and brought us here just to show it to us? Maybe, if we show them we understand, they will let us go!"

"Maybe. But we can't let them call the shots, and we can't think only of ourselves. You were right the first time. Just hold on, and we can remember..."

The recording trailed off in a few sighs and then breathing, heavy at first but quickly softening into restful sleep. Johanna reached for Gale. "I do remember it, all of it," Johanna said. "You do too. Tell me you remember. Tell me it's real."

He sprang up in sudden anger. "You bastards! You're doing it again! You're letting us remember, just to make us more confused the next time you make us forget!" He sprang for the door, but a force field hurled him back with an electric shock. He looked up, as the door opened.

"I'll grant you this, boy," Ligeus Hawthorne said. "You figure things out fast enough."


	14. Oedipus Wrecked

**I'll mention one thing: The lavatory is directly based on actual furnishings for a Travco RV.**

Ligeus Hawthorne's leather belt cracked, and Gale cried out in pain. Johanna leaped with a shout, but the father-Mutt sidestepped her and dealt her a lash to the bare backside, just before she struck the force field across the door. She was flung back to the bed and rolled off to land in a painful heap, but she rose up shouting defiance: "Dead or not, I'm going to kill you! A lot!"

Ligeus' belt stretched an exttra foot as he lashed, and it delivered an electric shock powerful enough to slam her into the wall. "No son of mine is going to let a woman fight his battles for him!" he snarled. Johanna lunged again, only to find herself enclosed by a force field between the wall and the bed. Gale used the opportunity to smash the plastic chair at the desk over his father's head. Ligeus literally crumpled in a heap, only to spring back up. Johanna was screaming and pounding against the force field, but the unseen barrier muted her. Gale went around his father and past her, into the closest thing to shelter at hand: the lavatory stall.

Father followed son, and they slammed back and forth between fiberglass walls. The shower came on, sending water spilling onto the floor through the open sliding door. Gale gagged as he was choked with the belt. Ligeus sputtered as his head was pushed into the toilet. Gale slammed the lid down on his father's head, and then pushed a control that folded the bowl back into the wall. It did, all the way, and Ligeus slid headless to the floor. Nevertheless, he rose, his head regenerating or simply reinflating. Gale gave a great lunge, and knocked his father all the way out of the stall.

"Hey, Pa," Gale said, leaning out from the doorframe, "you're grounded." Ligeus raised his head from the quite sizable puddle on the floor, just in time to see the water reach the door- and the electrified force field.

Gale took repeated jolts as electricity shot through the water, pitching back and forth in the isulated fiberglass doorframe of the shower. The Mutt of his father lit up with continuous current, convulsing about as his skin blistered and steamed. Still, Ligeus managed to rise rigidly upright, and lurched toward Gale with the belt raised. Gale gripped the sides of the door and kicked out with both feet. A horrific shock slammed him back against the corner, while his father went staggering back right into the force field. Gale lifted his head, and through a haze of stars he saw his father shuffling in place. His sking oozed and flowed like wax, and his eyes bulged as he returned Gale's stare. "You done me proud, boy," Ligeus said through clenched teeth. Then his head exploded and his torso split top to bottom, with a final jolt that blew out both force fields.

Johanna reached out and took Gale in her arms, while the hollow shell of Ligeus collapsed into pieces on the floor. They started to kiss. "Okay, that smell's killing my mood," Johanna said. They looked at what was left of Ligeus, which was deteriorating into foaming, reeking black ooze.

"Did you notice, he came in through the door?" Gale said. "And he's still here. I get this feeling... that's different, from wherever else we've been. When we're in here, their options are more limited. I think it's because these rooms were built to do a real job, not as a stage for a fantasy."

They threw on their clothes as they approached the door. No force field appeared to block their way, and the only lock was a stout bolt worked from inside. Johanna shrugged. "If this was built for Snow or someone like him," she said, "it wouldn't do to have the boss locked in if the power failed."

Johanna stepped through the doorway. "Wait," Gale said, and she paused, half in and half out of the room. Her eyes followed Gale's, to his father's belt. He picked it up like a putrid carcass, and went to the lavatory. The toilet flushed. Johanna smiled as he emerged.

"He may have made you who you are," she said, taking Gale's hand, "but you aren't him."

The corridor outside was empty, but they could hear Thread pacing the main corridor, making some kind of clanking noise as he walked. Gale and Johanna went to the junction, each armed with a plastic chair leg. and peered around the corner. Gale gave a low whistle. "So that's what he was doing in the store room," he said.

Thread had turned his simple entrenching implement into something a Gamemaster would have rejected as too tacky. The shovel blade had been turned at right angles to the handle, and the blade of a kitchen knife had been welded on behind it, approximating the shape of a pickaxe. A length of chain had been attached to the end of the handle and wrapped around Thread's waist, Gale assumed as a measure to keep the thoroughly-weaponized implement from being taken away.

Thread whirled about, and his eyes met Gale's. "Mutt!" he shouted. "Inside."

"I know," Gale said. "I killed it. But there will be more." He tried to go toward Thread, but a force field blocked him. Haymitch emerged, and then the others. Gale pressed his hands to the force field, making sure the others could see the barrier. "We're not where we think we are. We may not all be who we think we are," he said. Victoria asked a question, which he could not hear. He pressed against the field in frustration, until a shock jolted him back.

"The force field controls must be in the control room," Victoria said as she drew nearer the force field. Gale nodded. "We must get in there."

Every screen came to life. "Gale Hawthorne and Johanna Mason," Snow said. "This is your final warning. Return to your room, or I will be forced to deploy aversive measures against all occupants of this installation."

"You would torture them, just to get to us?" Gale shouted back. He eyed the control room door. "Or is it that you can't get to us? When I took out your force fields, did that knock out everything up here? I guess it's awful risky to send out more Mutts when you can't throw up a force field!"

"I have measures entirely adequate to deal with both of you at any time," Snow said. "But first, it will be necessary to provide a lesson you will not forget." At the end of the main corridor, the door to the decontamination room opened.


	15. Raccoons' War

**A couple more things to introduce this chapter: I debated mentioning before that I have chosen to use "hob" in this story in its traditional sense of a fairy or spirit. I also thought up a name for Romulus's shovel mk. 2, the "hoe-apick", and I was happy to introduce if as an example of the "junkyard tech" look I usually favor in my stories.**

Every door on the main corridor was blocked by a force field. Romulus, Haymitch, Victoria, Peeta and Prim could only back away from the figure that strode inside. Little Rosanna, perched in Prim's arms, pointed and said, "Mama?"

Peeta stared at the perfect likeness of Katniss Everdeen, in a simple hunting jacket. "No," he said. "She's not your mama, and that's not her."

Victoria drew closer to Haymitch. "I remember us talking, sometime for some reason, about a raccoon with a can," she said. "We're the raccoons, and we're _in_ the can."

"Mutt! Mutt!" Romulus shouted. He swung his weaponized shovel, driving the downturned and heavily sharpened blade deep into Katniss's skull. She dropped without a cry, but two more Katnisses followed, one wearing a stylized propo uniform and another in a bridal gown. The latter pushed back a veil, revealing a scaled Ophidian face.

"But I am Katniss," said the uniformed figure. "I am your Katniss, because you made me as I am. I wanted to be with Prim, but you would not let me go. Everything I am is yours." As she spoke, her face transformed into the Ophidian, and Prim placed Rosanna in Peeta's arms and walked with open arms toward the thing that had been her sister.

As the Ophidian's maw gaped for Prim's head, Romulus lunged in and hacked away half the distended lower jaw with the shovel head. The Ophidian gripped the shovel handle and jerked back, dragging Romulus toward the gowned Ophidian. He swung up and drove the knife blade into the roof of the Ophidian's mouth. The creature dropped, still gripping the shovel, while the bride passed by.

Romulus unwrapped the chain around his waist and lashed for the bride's skirts, entangling her and then jerking her off her feet. Peeta dragged Prim back, and Romulus jerked the shovel free of the dead claws. He caved in the back of the bride's skull with the flat of the shovel head as it rose, and turned to face the next comer. He froze: It was a woman of the Seam, with a child in her arms. "Mutt!" he screeched, brandishing the shovel. He lashed the chain. "Go back! Run! You could have run."

"To where?" she said hollowly. "To you? We would rather have burned." More followed, a solid wall of human misery. Some were horribly burned, but most had only the marks of grinding despair, and wide eyes that seemed frozen in looks of transcendent fear or resignation. "What will you do to us now? Kill us again?"

"No," Romulus said. "I did not do this. Even Snow would never have wanted this." His eyes fixed on one face, the scarred old miner from the platform. "You! You are not even dead!"

"Does it matter?" he answered. "You killed us all. You destroyed our homes. You took our hopes, even the smallest. You killed our spirits, as surely as the bombs killed us, and the bombs were kinder."

"Stand back," Haymitch warned, raising his knife. Victoria pressed against him, and he withdrew to the force field with the knife pressed to her throat. "Come any closer, and we'll do it!"

The mob halted halfway down the corridor. Prim moved forward, into their midst. "This is what you would give, to the others in this place," she said. "You would take them back to the ashes of their homes and the bones of the dead. You would make them remember. Do you truly think they will be better off here than there?"

Peeta set down Rosanna, and the crowd parted for him as he followed Prim. "You are not like these others," he said. "They are not real, and I don't think anyone was ever meant to think they were real. But you seem like you could really be Prim. If you really are, then you are my friend."

He put a brotherly arm around her. "Do you remember the times I walked you home from school? The other boys teased me. Once, my mother beat me because of it. They didn't understand. I loved Katniss, but she was like a hob-queen to me. I was too scared to try even being friends with her, and I didn't think I deserved it. But I could talk to you, and getting to know you was like getting to know her.

So if you are Prim, or even understand Prim, tell me: If Katniss was out there, where would you want her to be?"

Prim took his hand, and led him to the door of the utility room. At her touch, a force field crackled and dematerialized, long enough to open the door and guide him through. Behind them, the Mutt mob pressed against the field. Prim bent down beside a great, thrumming machine, and traced a pattern in the concrete floor. Where she touched, a little access panel appeared. The entire mob screamed in unison as she pried it up.

Prim clutched her abdomen, but smiled. "I give you," she said, "the can opener." Beneath the panel was one golden lever. Smoke was rising from between Prim's fingers. The field went down, and a dozen Mutts swarmed in. Peeta had just enough time to pull up the lever before he was seized. Then reaching arms suddenly withdrew, and he followed with a cry of anguish, shielding his eyes as Prim burst into flames.


	16. Out of Control

For a moment, every light in the shelter died. Haymitch gave a cry, holding onto Victoria for balance as a force field behind him dematerialized. Every door opened at once. After a moment of darkness, reddish-orange lights came on, and the voice of Silly Dilly Cartwright sounded from the intercom: "Do not be alarmed by this momentary disruption in services. Remain where you are until and unless advised to do otherwise. Services will be restored shortly..."

"Get Rosanna out of here!" Haymitch shouted to Peeta. "Vick and I are going in!"

"Holy hells," Gale said to Johanna, "they found an emergency stop... and that opens all the doors..." They looked to the yawning door of the control room. But suddenly, the doorway was not empty.

"You are getting such a whipping, boy," Ligeus Hawthorne said, twirling his belt. He halted, looking bemused as Romulus Thread pushed between them.

"Whip?" Romulus said. "You call that a whip?" He lashed the chain. "_This_ is a whip." He threw the weighted end of the chain like a lasso, only to jerk it back as their adversary transformed.

"Now, Administrator Thread," said Snow, "you would not strike your President, would you?" It was not the hollow likeness of before, but as well-realized as the vision of someone who had met the man in person, often.

"Yes, I would have," Romulus answered. "That's why you listened to me. I gave you a plan, because I expected you to listen. Why didn't you listen to me? Can you tell me that?"

"I thought we had an agreement, not to lie to each other," Snow said. "You knew my intentions for District 12, since well before the Mockingjay affair. I chose you as the person most capable of developing an efficient plan of action. Where your plan suited my purposes, I ordered that it be followed. Where it did not, I gave my own instructions."

"You don't know that," Thread said,. "You aren't him. You are the Mutt."

"I know what you know," Snow said, "and you knew him, better than anyone. That is how I can stand before you. I have seen to the core of your psyche, and taken from it the shape of your greatest desires and greatest fears." He threw back his head and laughed, not in Snow's cultured chuckle but the cackle of a maniac or a stock super villain.

Romulus struck. The chain wrapped around Snow's neck, but he only laughed louder as Romulus convulsed with an electric shock through his own weapon. Snow gripped the chain and pulled, forcefully enough to jerk Romulus off his feet, but the old peacekeeper kept his grip on the shovel. Johanna circled and drove her chair leg into Snow's chest, juping back with a cry from a current that ran even through the plastic. "Go!" Romulus shouted. He lunged in and struck repeatedly, heedless of intensifying electric shocks, and he and the Mutt fell, shuddering with every shock. The others scrambled past, but Gale paused long enough to drive the jagged end of the chair leg into the back of Snow's neck. The Mutt jerked once, and then both went still as the current stopped.

"What is this place?" Johanna wondered. Everything was utter black, except for lights that hung in the dark. As Gale stepped in beside her, he noticed that several lights briefly darkened, as if blocked by a moving shape. Johanna reached for the nearest light, a green circle with an indecipherable symbol in the middle. She found a slightly flexible surface around it, evidently transparent. They moved further in, and quickly got a sense of a circle thirty yards wide, ringed in touch controls and screens that flared to life, each with the image of Snow.

"As you can see," said Snow, "you can do everything, and yet you can do nothing. After all, what is a raccoon to do at the controls for the engines of Paradise?" Laughter came from every direction, but one sounded different. Gale looked back, to see one screen on a pod that circled on some kind of track overhead. As he watched, the pod descended to another track at their level. "You may have sabotaged my systems and slain my Avatar, but my systems are already restoring themselves. Soon, you shall have Paradise again, and you shall be my people, and I shall be their God!"

"All right," Johanna said to Gale, "this is getting weird. Well, weird in a whole different kind of way. I'm thinking_ crazy _weird, and it's not from copying Snow. I met him plenty of times, and not just in his controlled public appearances, and he never came within an order of magnitude of this. So where is this coming from?"

"There's something else," Gale said. "He said `I' and `my'; all the other Mutts said `we'."

"Yes," Victoria said, "that is very significant. `We' is collective or impersonal, consistent with a networked AI with neither full sentience nor autonomy. `I' implies a progression to self-awareness and individuality. But `my' is possessive, and represents an even greater step, from programmed subservience to self-interest. I believe it is possible that my previous hypothesis was not entirely correct. We were dealing with automated systems before, but now, we are facing... something else."

"Yes, I am different," Snow said as the pod circled. "I can kill you." Suddenly, the pod was behind Gale, swiveling around to reveal an iris hatch. He whirled around just in time to look down the barrel of a gun. Then he was swept off his feet, just as the gun pressed to his head. A bullet grazed his scalp and hit a force field that appeared in front of the controls. Then the pod zipped up and away, and more bullets flew, boucing off force fields that appeared in front of people and control surfaces. Finally, a field engulfed the pod, halting it in its tracks. Still, the shooting continued, as bullets bounced between the field and the shell of the pod, until ricochets started ringing inside the pod itself. The gunfire stopped, the field disappeared, and the pod descended to the floor.

Johanna knelt at Gale's side, and then looked at his feet. There was a chain wrapped around his ankles that trailed back to the door, where Romulus Thread was on hands and knees. "Not balanced," he said. "But... I did something."

"You already did enough," Gale answered.

Victoria and Haymitch were peering through the iris of the pod. Inside, a tall but slender body was curled up. She pulled off the helmet, reveling an elfin face with a dusky complexion and wide, slanted eyes. As they watched, the head tilted with one last breath, and then dropped. "This is one of the Ancients," she said. "No remains or visual records were ever found, but a thousand years of tradition has given us an entirely consistent description. The only inconsistency is that most descriptions portray them as very light in complexion, but that can be harmonized as variation within their stock."

"But who is he?" Gale said as he lurched over. "What was he doing, and what happened?"

"For all we know, it is a she," Victoria said. "Descriptions of the Ancients indicate that it was quite difficult to tell. In any event, the sequence of events is clear enough: This individual was ensconced here in the control room, and tried to kill us when we entered. But the security systems deployed force fields to protect us and the equipment, ultimately deflecting the gunfire back to its source. Clearly, whatever role the individual fulfilled did not include for or direct control over the facility's major systems. Beyond that, who `he' was and how he came to be here, we can only conjecture. The possibilities range from a great scientist overseeing a final experiment to an inmate who took over the asylum."

"You're right, there is no way to know," Johanna said, "I read about psychiatry once. It got awfully hard to tell the cures for crazy from the disease."

The iris closed, and the pod moved to the center of the track. It stopped over something like a pedestal, and rotated to turn the iris downward. There was a sound of the iris opening, followed by a pneumatic "shunk". Then the open iris came up again, revealing an empty interior.

The faces of Dilly Cartwright and President Snow appeared on the screens, smiling. "A problem in management transition has been resolved," Snow said. "All services will resume under new management."

Dilly said: "To complete this transition, please enter the pod."


	17. Inferno

Victoria leaned closer to examine the pod. It took a moment for her to realize that everyone else was looking at her. "What?" she said.

"What are you waiting for?" Haymitch said. "Get in there! It's not just a chance to get this place to let us go, it's a chance to study something the Ancients built from the inside out! It's the chance of a thousand lifetimes! Don't you see that?"

"I do," she said with a quaver in her voice. "But I shouldn't. Peeta's right, we aren't ready even to know this place could exist, because we can't handle getting what we wish for. If we could learn enough to control it and even replicate it, that would be the end of us. Maybe that was what ended the Ancients. Then there's something else: If I go in there, it has to be a one-way ticket. It's the chance of a thousand lifetimes, but it would be the work of a thousand lifetimes... and I would rather have one with you."

"No, it cannot be you," Romulus said. He dropped the shovel and looked to Gale. "It must be one of us. I think we understand each other enough to know, we are not so different. We are both men willing to do a terrible thing if it must be done, and suffer terribly for it. We both know what must be done now, and it is better if I do it, because you are the better man."

Gale extended a hand, and they shook. Johanna lunged to Gale's side. "What are you thinking?" she shrieked. "Are you seriously going to trust him with this?" She grabbed Romulus by the arm. "What are you going to do?"

"What Peeta said must be done," Romulus said. "Burn this place to the ground. You could say, I have had practice." Johanna embraced him before he could trudge away.

Peeta carried Rosanna through a thick fog. From all around them, he could hear voices crying out, and once he saw an open door in the rock. There had to be dozens, if not hundreds. "Go uphill, through the trees!" he shouted after a large group he heard passing by. "The way out is through there!" He marched toward a light at the edge of the dead forest, and somehow, he was not surprised to find a paved walkway, marked with dashes of neon green.

The path led up and up, until he cleared the mist and found himself at the lakeside forest. Except, there was no more lake, but only a basin full of mist. Peeta guessed that the mist was formed of what actual water had been in the lake, somehow flash-vaporized to prevent an instant flood at the failure of a force field covering the simulated wasteland beneath. He could hear shouts from below, and feet quickly making their way up. They were probably bettwer off than the people up here, who he could hear crying out in confusion and grief.

He froze at the sound of his own name. He looked to see a woman and a girl headed toward him, and something about their look made him guess, "Twill and Bonnie, from Eight."

"Yes," the woman said. "Katniss helped us, when we were trying to make our way to Thirteen."

He nodded. "She told me about you. You have to leave. There will be marked paths, like this one."

"That's what we were planning on," Twill said. "The problem is my husband, we were talking over lunch when he stopped talking, went to our bedroom and laid down."

Peeta swallowed. "Don't worry, ma'am," he said. He placed Rosanna in Twill's arms. "Here, carry her. I'll... I'll take care of your husband."

"Thank you," Twill said, and hurried away. Peeta sat down, and surveyed the landscape. Everywhere, the trees were changing. Golden leaves were turning brown and falling, already withered and crumbling as they hit the ground. Here and there, dead branches followed the leaves, and in the near distance, a tree fell over and split like old tinder. He did not need any of Johanna's lectures on forests to know that this was not an accelerated autumn, but drought and the death of a forest- and with dead and dry trees came fire.

Suddenly, a figure burst from the earth like a legendary revenant. Peeta jumped up in shock. It was Thread, not wielding his shovel or bearing the sack cloth of a Confessor, but proudly wearing the uniform of Head Peacekeeper. He unwound a whip, and lashed it in warning. "Run!" shouted Thread, and identical cries could be heard from every direction. "Run, or you will burn!"

Johanna took the lead as they ran. Already smoke was rising from the deeper woods. They followed the path along the east side of the lake. There were people with them, but not enough. She could here Peeta shouting somewhere close by, and Romulus's doubles were everywhere. "Yeah, yeah, we're going," Gale said as Romulus lashed his whip.

"I'm not," Johanna said. "Not yet." She moved toward one particular cabin, across the lake from Haymitch's great lodge.

Jan Donner was crouching on the floor next to Maysilee's limp body, weaping. Thread stood over him, roaring, "Run! Your daughter is dead, she died almost thirty years ago! You saw her die! You remember! Now leave her, or you will watch her burn again!"

Johanna slapped the Romulus-Mutt. "Try giving her something to run to, not from!" she shouted. Then she knelt beside old Jan. "Jan... Jan, it's me, Johanna. Your granddaughter."

He looked up at her. "That was a lie. My daughter Maysillee died. Her sister married the mayor and she had a daughter, but they would not let me see her because I would hold her too tight and not let her go. And then I was on the streets, and I would see little children, and try to hold them... and now they are gone, too. Burnt."

"I know," Johanna said, taking his hand. "They lied to you, and they lied to me to. But I remember I told you, I could have liked it if it were true."

"I remember," he said. "Was it true?"

"If it was not, do you think I would be here?" Then Jan took her hand, and as they walked they started to sing "Hanging Tree".

Peeta followed the trail to a door in the rock that opened into a long, long tunnel. He was not the first to arrive, but the score or so who preceded him only stood, gazing in fear and doubt. Romulus stood by the tunnel mouth. "Remember," the peacekeeper said as Peeta approached, "forget." Peeta nodded and stepped inside. It seemed like only a few paces before he was at the end of a tunnel, at the base of a stairway. He looked over his shoulder, and saw the mirror surface of a force field.

At the top of the stairs, he found himself at the foot of the Hanging Tree. A company worth of soldiers had gathered in and around the clearing, with a generous support staff of Restorers and specialists from Thirteen. None of them looked happy. "I am Peeta Mellark!" he shouted. "Are you looking for me?"

By the time Gale and his party arrived, more than a hundred people were gathered, and more were coming, much faster than those who had arrived could go through. Rather than try to approach, Gale igave instructions to try to direct the throng. He went with Johanna and Donner to the porch of the concrete cabin. From there, Jan's stentorian voice got people's attention, and Gale directed with gestures of Romulus' shovel. Screams rose from the crowd at an explosion from the far side of the lake, where Peeta's cabin would be, and Gale feared a stampede. "Hurry, but do not panic!" he shouted. "That house was already evacuated. It had to be destroyed. All of them do."

Things did go faster after that. Gale saw Haymitch and Victoria join the thinning flow from the west, and Gale waved them on. Haymitch looked back toward his lodge, just in time to see it go up in a great fireball. Victoria put an arm on his shoulder, and he took her hand and jogged for the tunnel.

"Go," Gale said to Johanna. She kissed him, and took Donner's arm. There was still a large crowd at the tunnel, but they were moving, and only thin trickles were coming behind them. The woods were burning merrily, and a house was exploding every fifteen or twenty seconds. By his best guesstimate, just over 300 had come to the tunnel. He had to be sure. He started to step down from the porch.

"Those who came here never thrived," a voice said. Gale looked to see Thread, not the Peacekeeper or the Confessor, but a younger man in a civil service uniform. "Most were gone within five years."

"Is this all?" Gale pressed insistently.

Thread shook his head. "Those who remain are not many, and they truly cannot leave. What will come will be kinder to them than sending them out. It will be kinder to me as well."

"I will remember you," Gale said, and then he ran.

He emerged from the tunnel in a scene of chaos. Evacuees were everywhere, sweeping away the formations of soldiers and support staff in waves of bewildered disorder. Gale was pushed into a space they had managed to keep clear. Someone in very official dress was asking questions to Peeta, while he only shook his head. Johanna was there, too, next to Jan Donner, who had Rosanna in his lap. He stroked her hair with almost painful gentleness, and she smiled at him. Gale looked back at the tree. It was as dead and dry as the ones in the Place. Already, branches were falling, causing a general retreat. As he watched, the door between the roots shut, and the trunk split open. The tree burst into flames, and in the same instant the earth shook at a flash of light like the rising sun from just over the mountains.

"That's it for Paradise," he said.

Johanna threw her arms around him and kissed him on the neck. "I don't care. I have you, and this time I'm never letting you get away."

"Are you going to eat me?" he said. She was starting to nibble.

"Hmmm..." She twirled her hair as if contemplating. "Only if you don't work out as a stud."


	18. Wedding Day

**I came up with two ideas for ending this story, one "fluffy" and one serious. This is the "fluffy" one. If you skipped chapter 16, I strongly recommend going back and reading it first.**

The wedding of Gale Hawthorne and Johanna Mason was supposed to be a small affair. Peeta performed the ceremony at his guest house. Gale's family was there, with Haymitch and Victoria, and Jan Donner took Johanna's arm as she and Gale signed a paper and gave the ritual pledge. But when they came out, five hundred people were in the Victory Village square. "See," Haymitch said, "this is what happens when you leave a thousand people without enough to do."

The first to meet the bride and groom was President Paylor. She and Gale went back into the house for a private meeting, while the rest of the party went forward to meet the well-wishers. "Citizen Hawthorne, I wish to congratulate you, but I also wish to express certain... concerns," she said. "It is strange that you and five people should disappear for a week and return without one of your party and with four hundred previously unsuspected survivors of Twelve in tow, professing no recollection of what happened. Some might be considered strange enough that you made arrangements to marry your former fiancee the next day. But nothing seems as strange to me as the fact that you immediately applied for a petition to grant your missing companion, Romulus Thread, consideration for a pardon for, in your words, `heroic and sacrificial service for Panem and District 12'. A very generous thing to say about the man who planned the murder of your district, especially regarding events you claim to have no memory of."

"I get flashes... pictures," Gale said. "Most of them are about Jo, or him. I remember him fighting to protect us, from some kind of Mutt. I think he gave his life for us. I should think the shovel is evidence enough... Frankly, what is the problem? Are you questioning my story, or my request?"

"I am asking you to consider the ramifications," Paylor said. "The legal status and treatment of Confessors and the much larger population of Restorers has been increasingly controversial. It has been kept quiet, but tensions are especially accute here in 12, where almost 20% of the current inhabitants are conscripted laborers. Even a review of Thread's case could cause unrest from both sides."

"Then respectfully, that is the best reason to have the hearing," Gale said. "Maybe we need to think about how to build a government on law, not vengeance. Maybe we just need to remember that even someone like Thread was still human. I think that was all he wanted, and it's one thing I'm sure he deserves."

They walked back out, and Paylor promptly headed for the train. Gale found Johanna talking to Peeta, and laughing loudly while he blushed. Jealousy was rising in Gale's face when Peeta turned and shook his hand. "You know how this is going to go: All over town, all day, all night, and probably some of tomorrow. I made arrangements for you to go somewhere more private when you're ready," Peeta said. "I was planning on stepping out myself. We're all happy for you... not just this, but for finding a life for yourself outside of Twelve. Nobody is expecting you to give that up. Just keep in touch. Katniss sends her regards." He gave Gale a last handshake and walked away.

Gale looked at Johanna. She was smirking. "All right, what were you talking about?" he said.

"Oh, just catching up a little," she said coyly, then laughed as he started to scowl. "All right, not about you! Actually, he wanted to talk to me about Katniss. Short story, they're working some things out, and while everybody in town's busy celebrating us, they decided to go out to the woods to work on it some more." Gale laughed himself.

Dilly Cartwright was among the first to meet Gale in the Village square. She hugged him, with Johanna looking at her the way a lion would at a jackal. "I'm so happy for you!" she squealed in her usual gush. Then she said, "I want to thank you... for speaking up for Thread. Don't listen to anyone who says he didn't deserve it. Even if they're right, it's hope for a lot of people." Gale looked after her as she walked away, long enough to draw a cool, questioning glance from his bride, but she saw what his eyes fixed on: Dilly walking into the midst of a crew of Restorers, and discretely taking the hand of one of them.

Gale was jolted by the sound of Victoria's voice. "Every society sets up barriers," she said, "especially to marriage and child-bearing with those outside itself. The Ancients, evidently, were stricter than most. By all accounts, they utterly forbade any semblance of fraternization with the general population. Yet, the very lengths they went to to enforce their taboos is the most compelling evidence that interbreeding could happen, and that they were not a discrete species. It appears that eventually, even they lowered their barriers."

Gale nodded, though he had no idea where this was supposed to be going or coming from. "Right, there's stories about that," he said. "It goes that the Ancients used to marry people from the mountains, or at least drop in to sow the oats. The offspring were called hob-children."

"I've noticed something about how you look, and Katniss too," Victoria said, continuing on her seemingly disjointed way as her voice lowered toward a whisper. "Haymitch says it's just the `Seam look'. I remember thinking, when we looked in that pod... the Ancient looked like you."

"I thought it looked like you," Gale said, "except for the skin."

As Peeta had said, the wedding celebration spread out all over the settlement, and promised to continue into the hours of the morning. The bride and groom moved about, mingling, and Gale seriously considered remaining for the duration. But it didn't take long for Johanna to go from interest to indulgence to open impatience. By 4 in the afternoon, she was chewing on his ear, and he was convinced it was time to go. A cooperative crew assigned by Peeta made every effort to keep their exit discrete, but a generous crowd was waiting to cheer the couple as they boarded a tractor outbound for the woods.

"Aw, no," Johanna said, "we aren't going...?" But they were. There was the lake ahead, and the cabin.

"I guess Katniss and Peeta have a new place," Gale said as they disembarked Johanna looked around once they were inside. "Well, at least it has a TV. Hey, what are you doing?"

Gale had started a fire, and he was getting out a loaf of bread. "Come on," he said, "we have to do this. It's tradition." With only moderate snarking, Johanna accepted a piece of bread and a long fork to hold it with. He put an arm around her, and showed her how to hold the bread just the right way for it to brown gradually. "Johanna, I've been thinking... about the Place."

She groaned. "I'm thinking it's bad enough you're making me wait to burn a piece of bread without bringing up how you thought you were married to another woman."

"I wasn't, Jo," Gale said, "it's just, I think about how we got out, and I can't help thinking of something I heard a screenwriter talk about once... _Deus Ex Machina_, `God from the machine', where the resolution's so contrived there's no way to believe it's real. Really, what else do you call the things that happened? The way the force field fried fake-Dad and blew the field genetators out; the way the Prim-clone pulled the lever; and then the way the Ancient basically shot himself... The Place might as well have been trying to shut itself down."

Johanna mustered a look of thoughtful interest. "Maybe it was," she said. "Maybe the AI recognized that it was doing harm and no good, but couldn't shut down. That, or the guy in the control room kept it running. Or, here's another idea... Maybe we didn't get out. Maybe I'm not really Johanna Mason. Maybe I'm a Mutt who wants to hold you hostage... Oh, but maybe you're a Mutt, maybe you're such a perfect copy you think you're Gale Hawthorne..."

"Jo. You're on fire."

"Hells, am I..."

"No, seriously, your toast is on fire!" Johanna gave a surprised shriek as her bread burst into flame, setting a good part of Gale's alight in the process. She dropped her fork right in the fire. He took a look at his blazing piece and shook it loose.

"I know how to know if this place is real," Johanna said as they scrambled into a bed fit for one and a half. She kissed, and then bit.

"Ow," Gale said in mild complaint, "that hurt."

"Exactly. I wouldn't do that if I was a Mutt, would I?"

"Hey, I'm bleeding!"

"Then bite back, Mama's boy." He did.

The TV came to life. "Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne," Snow said sternly. "`Playful' use of force is a perfectly acceptable means to facilitate catharsis. But this is taking the exercise entirely too far..."

Gale started to lift his head. "That didn't just happen, did it?"

"No," Johanna said, "that definitely didn't happen."

"What didn't happen?"

"Exactly..."

From the screen, Snow watched for a few moments, looking vaguely bemused. Then he flared his nostrils in a last sardonic snort and lifted a remote. At the push of a button, the screen went dark.


	19. Rebirth

The girl was twelve, fair and graceful, though she was dressed in a rough and ragged skirt and blouse. Her eyes opened, and she sat up on the metal table, rubbing her palm with her thumb. "Where am I?" she said aloud. She knitted her eyebrows. "What happened to me?" Above her, a screen came to life. It showed her by bright moonlight, walking up to a tree with brilliantly white bark and golden leaves. She jabbed herself with a knife, rubbed her palm with a scrap of cloth, and placed the rag between the largest roots.

"I wish," the girl said, "that my sister Katniss would... come home from the Games."

The girl clasped her hands together, still rubbing her palm for the remembered stigmata. "Why are you showing me something I just did?" She lowered her hands. "But it's been longer. Hasn't it?"

The screens went dark, and an unfamiliar face appeared. She tensed when she saw his Capitol uniform. "Your name is Primrose Everdeen," the man said. "Except, you are not her. Your wish came true, whether or not it was by any power you invoked. Your sister did survive the Games. She still lives, and there are no more Games, because her victory inspired others to bring them to an end. But many have died, including the original Primrose Everdeen. You are a copy, made from genetic material and a full neural scan taken when the first Prim made her wish, five years ago. Now come forth, and meet your new companions."

A door opened, and Prim stepped into a larger, twelve-sided chamber. From similar doors on every side came others, ranging from little children barely out of toddlerhood to one young man of at least sixteen, but mainly between ten and fourteen years old- exactly the ages when young people had the right combination of independence and whimsy to carry out a silly ritual in the woods. Around them and overhead, a panorama of screens flared to life, all showing the man in the Capitol uniform.

"My name is Romulus Thread," the man said. "I will begin by telling you a story. Long ago, the world was ruled by one great people, the greatest of all peoples who ever lived- the Ancients. To preserve their greatness, the Ancients forbade marrying common humans. But isolation from fellow humanity also multiplied imperfections among them. To renew their line, they took a drastic step, by taking wives and husbands from among the common folk.

"But, it was too little, too late: The Ancients' numbers had already dwindled too much, and then the great Cataclysm rent the earth. The Ancients retreated into their great cities beneath the Earth, where they either went to their final extinction or entered a sleep as long as an age of the Earth They left behind one great hope, that their children would multiply on the Earth and restore it, and perhaps prepare it for the Ancients' return. These were your ancestors- the peoples of what became Districts 12 and 13 of Panem.

"Over the gulf of centuries and millennia, the memories of the Ancients became dim legend, even in the minds of their children. The children of the Ancients took their places in Panem, and most believed they were only what they appeared to be: minor, somewhat odd peoples on the outliers of the new nation. But the evidence was there, and those who knew feared. They saw the gifts of the Ancients at work in even the smallest strivings of their children. They feared the consequences if you found a Storehouse of the Ancients, still more if the Ancients themselves came forth to lead you. Yet, they were checked by still greater fear at the consequences if even beings as merciful as the Ancients awoke from a sleep of ages and found only the graves of their children, murdered by mediocrity. Then one evil man, but also a very, very frightened man, came to great power, and he believed there could be but one solution..."

He showed brief flashes of hovercraft, balls of fire, and finally a great pit dug up to receive the bones of the dead. Tears sprang up in Prim's eyes, and when Romulus's face returned, he himself was shaking with stifled sobs. "What he did not know was that the Ancients left an outpost to watch over their children, wholly automated, except for a caretaker. Whether the Ancients slept or perished, the outpost did its duty, collecting genetic samples from their children. Unfortunately, the caretaker grew quite mad. He let certain experiments go too far for too long. Finally, he had to be removed, by myself and two of your friends." He showed Gale and Peeta. "When the caretaker was dead, I took his place. I gave an order to terminate the experiments, and set off a great bomb to cut off all access to the outpost... from the south."

"Then what have you brought us here for?" Prim said.

The screens showed sweeping panoramas of a great valley. "I am offering you the chance to go forth on a great adventure," Thread said. "If you do not know this place by sight, then you will know it by name, as the Vale of the Hob. I wish for you, and others I will remake, to explore this valley. I want you to scour for any and every trace of the Ancients, and any clue to their fate. More than that, I want you to settle in the valley. You are fully human in every way. You will grow up and grow old. The one thing you cannot do is multiply yourselves, because you did not undergo a full and natural life cycle. But I shall remake more tribes of children to follow you as you advance into the Vale. Then when you are old enough to marry and wish to have children, the machines that created you will recombine your genes into children that you can bear to birth and will be able to bear by themselves."

The picture of the Vale returned. "It must be slow, and secret at first, because the world behind is not ready to know the secrets that brought you forth and the secrets that you may yet find. But the time will come soon enough when your children's children fill this vale, and then their children shall go forth to find their place in Panem, be it as free citizens, or conquerors of a new tyranny, or inheritors of its ruins."

The pictures of the Vale came up again, and Prim took a good, long look. "What will you do?" she said. "Will you rule us?"

Suddenly, the ceiling split, shining down daylight, and the floor rose like an elevator in the mines. Many of the children began to cry, and Prim herself crouched in fear. The floor came to a stop in the midst of a beautiful meadow, with a lodge a short distance away. Romulus Thread approached from the Lodge- three of him. Two were young, and one was old and scarred.

"I will direct the machines that gave you life and will give you your children,"said the elder Thread. "I have the Stores of the Ancients at my fingertips, to produce agents in my likeness, to prolong my life for an age if need be, and to rain down death on any who would come to threaten your lives or your freedom, be it from Panem, or a city of the Ancients, or out of your own number. I will guide you and teach you. I will serve you and protect you, and I will never leave you nor forsake you."

The young man spoke up: "What if we want to take care of ourselves?"

"Then if that time comes when one of you is willing and worthy, he- or she- will take my place, and I will welcome it. Now, go forth, and make your ancestors proud." He stepped onto the floor while the children scrambled off, and when the last were off, the platform sank down with Thread upon it and the ground closed over it, leaving only what looked like a shallow depression visible upon the surface

Prim turned to another girl, a little older than herself. "I'm Prim," she said. "What's your name?"

"I'm Maysilee Donner," the girl answered, then added, "I wished that someone from Twelve would win the 50th Hunger Games."

The young man who had questioned Thread was approaching, with more than a hint of a swagger. "Who are you?" Prim said.

"I'm Ligeus Hawthorne," he answered. A frown crossed his face. "I wished for my girl back. I guess I got her." He looked over his shoulder, at the watching visage of Romulus Thread, and turned back with a smile. "All in all, I think I could like it here."


End file.
